Book Banning - Tumblr Posts
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help fight book censorship
There's really nothing more to say, it's funny that Orwell's 1984 hasn't been banned yet.
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Beware of books by people who forbid books. There was once a book that contained everything, and after the catastrophe nobody wanted to read it.
So read, understand and resist!
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Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Heinrich Heine
I have no words
I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again
There's only one book in my entire life of reading that I truly wished I had a warning for, but it still wasn't that hard for me to just put it down and move on to another one. I'm sure if I read reviews before I picked it up, I would have seen it had on page domestic violence, and I would have passed it over. The fact that I didn't isn't the authors' or publishers' fault.
This is also why when I used to regularly review books, I'd include trigger warning for the serious stuff I know could possibly trigger a trauma response for someone.
The idea that writers should be required to give content warnings is actually a gateway to censorship and book banning.
➡️ Content warnings on fiction are a courtesy.
➡️ Not every medium of fiction and storytelling has or is expected to have content warnings or extensive tagging.
➡️ Print novels do not traditionally warn for content in any way.
➡️ Until AO3 came along, fanfiction did not traditionally warn for content in any significant way.
➡️ An author is only obligated to warn for content to the degree mandated by the format they publish their fiction on.
➡️ Content warnings beyond the minimum are a courtesy, not an obligation.
➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is a valid tag that authors are allowed to use on AO3. It means there could be anything in there and you have accepted the risk. 'May contain peanuts!'
➡️ Writers are allowed to use 'Creator chose not to warn' for any reason, including to maintain surprise and avoid spoilers.
➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is not the same thing as 'no archive warnings apply'.
➡️ It is your responsibility to protect yourself and close a book, or hit the back button if you find something in fiction that you're reading that upsets you.
➡️ You are responsible for protecting yourself from fiction that causes you discomfort.
Allow me to assure you, as a librarian, that if you as a concerned citizen present us with a list of Books that are Bad and should Not Be In Our Collection and which you Require us to Remove At Once, we will scan it for titles that we don’t have yet to add to our purchase list.
Seattle Public Library is doing this awesome program called Books Unbanned that allows teens and young adults (ages 13-26) access to their collection of e-books and e-audiobooks from anywhere in the USA. All you need to do is fill out a simple form and you get their Books Unbanned card. Please share this information far and wide. I know they're not the only ones to have done this, but the more the merrier!
Say it louder for the people in the back!
The narrow-minded and fearful should never make curriculum choices for students.
If life scares you, open up a book.
There is something seriously wrong with the powers that be in the United States. Books are being banned and Drag shows are considered evil...yet cannibalism aimed at kids is okay as long as you can make a fucking buck! Outrageous!
I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again
i am not a fan of book banning for almost any reason (and even then it should be centered more around letting people use their discretion to say “um maybe kids shouldn’t be reading erotica” than “this topic is ugly and opens the door to too many questions so we just shouldn’t talk about it”) but so much of book banning revolves around this very idea, that if a book so much as mentions a difficult topic, we shouldn’t talk about it, rather than the way the topic itself is handled
"this work is problematic because of how it handles [subject]": reasonable premise for media criticism
"this work is problematic because it depicts [subject]": do not pass go do not collect $200 this is, as a general rule, a functionally reactionary and conservative argument