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https://eand.co/we-need-to-talk-about-ron-desantiss-fascist-paradise-e3784261dd7c>
"It sounds like something you might have seen a sign for, cruising down a
golden, sunlit highway, in your convertible, once upon a time. A motel,
perhaps, in shades of seafoam blue-green.
Ron DeSantis’s Fascist Paradise.
(Well, except for the fascist part, that is.) And yet that appears to be what
Florida’s becoming, and no, I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating.
Perhaps you read a recent series of articles and tweets that went viral. One by
Amanda Marcotte, worth reading in full, is an excellent summary. Let me cite a
little bit of it, which is shocking.
A Florida law signed by DeSantis requires that every book available to
students “must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid
educational media specialist certificate,” in most cases, the school
librarian. This may sound reasonable on its surface, but as the situation in
Manatee County shows, in reality, it’s about creating a bottleneck
preventing books from getting into the hands of students.
How bad is it? Just how dystopian are we talking? As the journalist Judd Legum
pointed out, “Teachers in Manatee County have been told to remove all books
from their classroom libraries. On Monday, for example, teachers at Bayshore
High School in Manatee County received the following message: ‘Remove or cover
all classroom libraries until all materials can be reviewed.’”
Did you get that? Teachers are removing or covering up…all the books. Until
they can be “reviewed.” For what, precisely? We’re about to get to that, but
first: if that sounds a whole lot like the Taliban, that’s because
it is. We
should never, ever see — in a modern society, a democracy, a liberal state, and
I don’t mean that in a partisan sense, just as in “one founded on notions of
liberty”…something like all the books in classrooms or libraries being
covered
up. (Like, for example, the way
women are, under the Taliban, who also do
things like ban books, which are dangerous and subversive, because
they…enlighten people.)"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
