Healthy music

At History News Network, Iliana Alanís notes this about the Texas SBOE's new education curriculum:

Not even music was immune to the chopping block. The Board removed hip-hop and Tejano music and replaced them with country music, justifying it as the genre for family values.

I'm guessing they had David Allan Coe in mind.

Mapping banned books

From the Maps listserv, here's a Google Maps plotting of banned books ( as compiled from the ALA's "Books Banned and Challenged 2007-2008," and "Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009," and the "Kids' Right to Read Project Report"). How does your neighborhood compare?


I notice that not every item on the source lists seems to be plotted, so maybe Utah isn't as clean as it looks. Still ... didn't you think there'd be a few markers there? Maybe I should give more credit where credit is due.

Despite a certain incompleteness, someone has made the map pretty informative. As you mouse over the markers, it pops open some copied-and-pasted text that describes the incident behind the listing. Some of the usual suspects are there, including Philip Pullman and JK Rowling; also, someone considered Craig Thompson's Blankets too sexy and had it moved from a young adults section. Someone else thinks Of Mice and Men is an offensive load of crap and shouldn't be read. In general, bad books are those that mention sex, contain swear words, and don't flatter Christianity.

Of course, I'm not always completely on-board with the banned books lists, as they tend to lump every type of "challenge" together in a single category. Some parents question whether a books is age-appropriate, not whether it has any value. I might disagree, but it's a fair question.

I'm also slightly open to complaining when books are assigned reading. I'm not really opposed to children being forced required to read things they might not otherwise encounter, but even a schoolteacher doesn't have complete authority to override parental wishes. I think it's a bad impulse to complain - giving a child a book is not an effective brainwashing technique, but shielding them from any message but your own is. So I disapprove , but the parents aren't necessarily outside their rights.

Then there are the demands that books be removed from library shelves. That's entirely wrong, period. You don't have the right to demand that no one else's child be allowed to read a book.

Freedom demands censorship

I just noticed that one of my friends from high school has joined a Facebook group called "Petition to remove 'Soldiers are not heroes' from facebook." It turns out there is a group called "Soldiers are not heroes," whose description contains statements like this:

This group is intended to point out the absurdity of the many groups on Facebook that portray all soldiers to be heroes and shower the armed forces with unconditional praise.

Putting on a soldiers uniform does not make you a hero.

Supporters of the group generally agree that the wars that our armed forces are participating in at the present time and in recent years are unnecessary and unjust. Therefore we don't feel that we should be pressured into offering "support" to people fighting and killing innocent people for causes that we don't believe in.

I agree, at least as far as that goes (there is also some sentiment that soldiers are always positive villains, which I don't necessarily endorse). Not everyone who is in the military deserves to be called a hero, and there's a straight path between loving soldiery and loving war, a path that too many Americans have rushed down without a glance to either side.

Now, some pro-military people have decided this is "hate speech" and they want Facebook to ban the group. You can probably guess the argument: you shouldn't be allowed to criticize soldiers because they're defending your right to speak freely. Or, as one punctuationally-challenged caps-locker put it:

WHY WOULD SOMEONE SAY SOLDIERS ARE NOT HEROES. RESPECT THEM OR YOU FORGOT THAT IF IT WASN'T FOR SOLDIERS RIGHT NOW WE WOULD BE UNDER NAZI OR JAPANESE OR COMUNIST RULE?

I call bullshit. No soldier since the American Revolution has fought to keep this country from being occupied by a foreign power (technically, not even then). No soldier has fought against anyone who had the power to curtail my civil liberties. Not now, not ever in the last 200 years.

Even Nazi Germany, certainly the worst enemy we've ever fought, was no threat to occupy the US and establish a dictatorship here. It would have hurt us to have Europe so enslaved, but the Germans could not have imposed their system on us. Only Americans have or had the power to do it.

Keeping a large nuclear arsenal and a powerful army in Europe did much to deter Communist expansion, but Communism wasn't defeated by warfare. Korea was a draw and we lost in Vietnam. If remaining free depended on our soldiers winning wars - well, let's thank God it didn't.

Saddam Hussein posed no threat to American liberties. Neither does Osama bin Laden. The latter had the ability to very occasionally kill some of us, but his most spectacular success killed fewer Americans than our own actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have. If defending freedom is the goal, we needn't do anything; if saving lives is the goal, we'd have done better just hunkering down.

Do we need soldiers? Sure, we need a few. But we don't need as many as we have, all over the world, killing tens of thousands in foreign countries that pose only modest threats to ourselves. We would be just as free today, without a huge omnipresent military, as Switzerland. If we keep censoring unpopular opinion, we'll be as free as Iran.


________
PS. Favorite quote from the rant discussion board:

A true soldier is one that seeks to serve their country, not to destroy others.

Secret libraries

Well, you can't believe everything you read on the internet, but I so want to believe that this is real.

Via librarian.net.

State secrets

I don't like this:

Obama Administration Maintains Bush Position on 'Extraordinary Rendition' Lawsuit

A representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn't changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.

I'm willing to consider that this might be a necessary and reasonable position -- pending further actions which the new administration takes in cleaning up our act in the GWOT. But it doesn't obviously fit in with the other actions Obama has taken toward ordering a more open, law-abiding government. Which way is the story going to go? A) Openness is the general guiding principle, but there are a few rare exceptions that have to be made; or B) Openness will be played for its political value when there's not much at stake, but any time there's a rub Obama will readily claim all the privilege and power that other presidents have claimed.

It's too soon to either condemn or excuse the new President on this one action, but conservatives disgraced themselves by refusing to be skeptical of Their Guy in the White House; liberals don't need to go repeating their failures. We want the rule of law again, and we want it now.


(via D.A. Ridgley at Positive Liberty)

Self-censorship after criticism

While doing some research into open access journals, I found this one at Public Library of Science:

The Chilling Effect: How Do Researchers React to Controversy?

The authors conducted interviews and surveys with researchers whose work had been exposed to controversy, mainly by accusations of wasted money. The findings:

The NIH defended each grant and no funding was rescinded. Nevertheless, this study finds that many of the scientists whose grants were criticized now engage in self-censorship. About half of the sample said that they now remove potentially controversial words from their grant and a quarter reported eliminating entire topics from their research agendas. Four researchers reportedly chose to move into more secure positions entirely, either outside academia or in jobs that guaranteed salaries. About 10% of the group reported that this controversy strengthened their commitment to complete their research and disseminate it widely.

As some others* have noted, all of the examples of "wasteful earmarks" that John McCain and Sarah Palin trotted out during the election campaign were appropriations for basic science or science education. It's bad enough that this encourages voters and lawmakers to think of these fields as wasteful; add to that the possibility that the researchers themselves will begin to shy away from their work and you get a double hit on science.



* At Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Panda's Thumb, or Pharyngula, can't really recall where just now. Doesn't matter - you should be reading them all, anyway.

Sarah Palin, censor

From today's Time Magazine article, via librarian.net:

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

"Sanitizing" history

There's been a fascinating, and unusually lengthy, discussion going on at the SAA's Archives & Archivists listserv. The original question was

I was wondering if anyone has had the task of digitizing a yearbook from another "era" and dealing with images that would be considered controversial in today's environment. Our intention would be to preserve the images in-house, but the yearbooks that were made available to the Web would be missing them. Any insights/advice would be appreciated

Most of the immediate response was horror at the idea of censoring anything, but a few people brought up an important point: there is a difference between making images available to researchers and publishing them on the internet. Perhaps more importantly, there is a difference between publishing them in an obscure journal or coffee table book and publishing them on the internet. Simply put, if you have some kind of offensive sexist or racist material on your website, the craziest loons on the intertubes can use them in ways that might reflect back on your institution. It's not unreasonable to be concerned about that. Deciding not put something on the net isn't the same thing as hiding its existence; it's still available to anyone who really wants to see it.

Of course, there's always the possibility of being overly sensitive; some commentators even questioned the very idea that old yearbooks could contain anything that offensive.* I would tend to err on the side of publishing anything and everything, myself. But I've seen some pretty ugly historical images that I wouldn't want showing up on a white supremacy website with a link back to my institution and I'd be willing to keep lower, rather than a higher, profile in order to prevent that.

Meanwhile, the thread has spun itself into a discussion of postmodernism, rationality, and - wait for it - Nazi ideology.



*There's been no discussion of why these particular images are controversial, so I don't know what's in them, either.

UM Press caves to criticism

U-M shelves connection to publisher

When the controversy flared last summer, the executive board of the U-M Press defended its relationship with Pluto, saying reservations about the content of a single book shouldn't interfere with an existing business relationship, and that stopping the book's distribution would be a blow to academic freedom and free speech.

Yep.

Peggy McCracken, an associate dean at Michigan who is chair of the executive board of the press, said that politics wasn’t the issue. She said that because Pluto doesn’t have peer review on the Michigan model, it would be inappropriate to keep the ties. “The issue is review procedures,” she said.

... yeah.

More at Michigan Severs Ties to Controversial Publisher

McCain=Bush

More evidence that this country desperately needs a program of debushification and isn't going to get it:

Woman Arrested at McCain Event for "McCain=Bush" Sign

I have to object a little, however, to the assumption that a 61-year-old librarian is the acme of harmlessness. The Party knows better.

[via Library Juice]

Popline, continued

More on the Popline case, where administrators at Johns Hopkins blocked searches on "abortion" and related terms. USAID claims that they never asked for this action and Popline overreacted to some complaints about specific articles. This is probably true, but I don't consider it an innocent mistake. It's an indication of how far the expectation of censorship has gone in this country, when people begin to censor themselves even more than the government demands of them.

Caving to those who want to hide information

I wasn't familiar with POPLINE, "the world's largest database on reproductive health," until now. It's maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development. (USAID). Now, the folks running USAID are strongly anti-abortion, and apparently the folks at the INFO Project would rather play ball than search for other funding.

I especially like the "I hope this helps" at the end of the reply. No, denying access to health information never helps. Not a bit.

And no, it's not an April Fool's joke at all. You really can't find a single article at POPLINE if you search on "abortion."