{"id":13250,"date":"2025-03-02T17:14:35","date_gmt":"2025-03-02T22:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13250"},"modified":"2025-03-02T17:14:35","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T22:14:35","slug":"banning-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13250","title":{"rendered":"Banning books"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning, I stumbled upon an article<\/a> in The Walrus<\/em>, a Canadian newsmagazine, about book bannings… in Canada. It appears to be a robust, well-informed piece. It tells us, among other things, that book banning in libraries is popular on all sides of the political front. “Think of the children!” seems to be a common theme, whether it is conservatives trying to protect young readers from what they perceive as “grooming” or progressives trying to weed out works that they find “offensive”.<\/p>\n

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The CBC also had a recent report<\/a> about the banning of books, but their reporting appears to be more concerned about bans specifically targeting “2SLGBTQ+” literature. (Frankly, I find this ever growing acronym itself a painfully transparent exercise in virtue signaling — the CBC demonstrated my concern when they failed to use the acronym consistently themselves, writing “2SLGBTQ” later in the same article, only to switch to “LGBTQIA+” when quoting another report.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, The Walrus<\/em> points out that censorship often has the opposite effect: E.g., when an attempt was made on Salman Rushdie’s life, sales of The Satanic Verses<\/em> soared on Amazon. (Speaking from personal experience: I’d not have obtained, and read, a copy of Orwell’s 1984<\/em> in, well, 1984, had it not been on the list of unwelcome literature by communist authorities in my native Hungary.)<\/p>\n

And of course one also has to wonder, as The Walrus<\/em> does, if books are still relevant in the Internet era, when much of the written word we consume these days comes in forms other than traditional books or even electronic editions.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning, I stumbled upon an article in The Walrus, a Canadian newsmagazine, about book bannings… in Canada. It appears to be a robust, well-informed piece. It tells us, among other things, that book banning in libraries is popular on all sides of the political front. “Think of the children!” seems to be a common […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,22,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-canada","category-politics","category-9-id","category-22-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13252,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250\/revisions\/13252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}