https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/11/russia-law-ban...
When they tell you of all the insane shit they want, believe them. They are an existential threat to the republic, because they don't place any value any of the immutable principles of the republic, and will sell all of them up the river to see their guy win.
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[1] Their actual behavior is incredibly un-Christ-like.
I hope they don't start a youth movement like the scouts and name it after their leader.
Still, there are several major differences one bieng the patriarch supporting Putin while the Catholic church mostly opposes Trump.
Russian Orthodoxy, on the other hand, encompasses ~95% of Russian Christians, and there is no organized alternative to it.
... Also, Trump 2024 won Catholics by 12 points (While 2020 and 2016 was a 50/50 split.)
Whatever the church's views are, unlike the evangelicals, it's not dictating to its members how they should vote.
The approach that most people in the US seem to favor is "this is totally fine that the right-thinking government can do this, the problem is that the other guys occasionally get to rule".
The real solution is to remove the levers, or the federal spending, so that neither side can do it.
Which means all poor public school districts (free breakfast programs are funded with federal money) and most other public schools districts (special needs programs are funded with federal money). So the “only” here is basically “all” public school districts.
Children do not have the full set of adult rights.
Private secular schools have fights about what gets taught.
Private religious schools have fights about what gets taught.
Children have more rights in public schools than they have in private schools. Tinker v. Des Moines: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
1. Ban exposing minors to "sexual material." Who would be against that? Surely only weirdos would push to expose kids to sex and pornography. Make sure this gets challenged in court and that it's found constitutional under 1A.
2. Define things we don't like as sexual material. Obviously being gay is entirely about sex, just like being trans is about genitals. You don't even have to speculate that this is the motive—it's defined explicitly in the bill.
3. Boom, you found a legal way to ban what would otherwise be a pretty obvious 1A violation.
This is the public institutions half, it's harder to swing a bill like this for private institutions which is why that's handled with age verification bills. That way it's not technically a ban.
Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.
"For other purposes" is going to be doing a Herculean effort of carrying for the next few years if this passes. for example:
>This bill includes “lewd” and “lascivious” dancing as prohibited topics or themes.
I guess we learned nothing from Footloose.
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And yes, for a TLDR on the article and the general situation of this the last decease or so: such book bans tends to be a roundabout way to associate "sexually oriented" topics with the trans community. Sometimes the entire LGBT umbrella is hit.
Pre-epstien, I'd be surprised that such people care much more about what goes on with a person's state of being than the person themselves. But it really seems like every accusation is a confession.
Yup. When books get banned for containing actual sexual content, that gets reverted https://www.newsweek.com/bible-banned-texas-schools-over-sex...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Miller_(politician)#:~:te...
And if you think I'm kidding, no I'm not.
Some of those boys end up with herpes, but it's all fine in MAGA land.
Source, straight from the horses mouth: https://youtu.be/KolvU5m0CZI?si=KMnq_y8KfGuhXkDY&t=410
[0] Why does a dog lick his balls?
Unfortunately, some of them is going to abuse that.
But that what politics is - only trade-offs, no perfect decisions. Only brain ded radicals of all sides think there are simple solutions.
In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.
Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.
You may be okay with your children reading some books. That's great, and you should be able to find the right school districts for them, and I should be able to do the same to ensure my children don't read through explicit material without any form of parental oversight.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime. They called their legislators to make the changes and, in a rare event, the legislators listened and are acting upon it.
The system, for once, seems to be working. Both sides should see the objective value in at least that.
This variation of the origin story gets a lot of play. However it doesn't address the outside book-ban groups who provide titles to parents - or who just appear at school board meetings themselves.
Eleven "super requesters" — those who raised concerns about or challenged
15 or more titles at a time — accounted for 73% of the targeted books.
They often referred to lists of books originating in other districts
or from online forums. Some had no children in the district.
In nearly 60 cases, the school district didn’t own the book
the requester sought to remove.
Can you elaborate?
>The system, for once, seems to be working.
Interesting worldview.
That’s definitely not how this is playing out.
There is no limit on how far back the clock is allowed to turn.
Things that will be targeted:
* homosexuals (often the first)
* non whites
* interracial marriage
* voting rights
* voting right for women
* women’s suffrage
* education for girls
* no fault divorce
* freedom of speech
* freedom of mobility (like to leave the country)
* trade unions / labor unions
* Freemasons (Oddfellows, etc)
* practicing a religion other than Christianity
* environmental regulations
* public lands, federal parks
* etc etc etc
Look not to China or North Korea for the operating model but East Germany during the Cold War. There was a massive surveillance operation in place then and technology has only improved.
Freedom is not guaranteed and for most of human history was not a goal.
Wonder how far down the agenda slavery appears.
It just depends how much the government wants to go fundamental and how much people allow it.
Can you elaborate on how you think these two things are comparable?
The former is "tax dollars can't be spent on books that depict certain content". The latter is "a revolution lead by Islamic theocrats installs a brutally repressive islamist regime that transformed an otherwise western country into a hellscape". You think these things are the same?
Sorry, that's just naive, overconfident liberalism. There is no mandatory "direction" to social change. Given enough time, every bit of that toothpaste will go back in that tube, and enough more time it will come out again, only to go back in after a spell. And it won't be an oscillation. It'll be some weird path none of us can predict.
Like the Great Rus and Kirill give a cultural justification for Putin war and anchors them in an historical framework where they make sense, Trump (I mean Vance really) is using the evangelists and the threat of a perceived shift in what makes America America has a justification for his policies.
It's pervasive throughout Project 2025.
Now, the reason the admin can do that is because every district in the country is yoked to federal funds. This gives them a massive power lever. As far as massive power goes, it's strange that HN understands this well with surveillance but not with anything else. Surveillance is really great, if you could magically make it only usable by people you agree with, say to find lost pets or catch armed robbers and nothing else.
However if you create a power, it will also be used by people you disagree with, for the purposes you abhor. The only solution is to remove the power.
If not, what is your other solution, never allow people who disagree with you to win elections?
Short version: the US military provides some funding to the scouts. Hegseth threatened that funding to push the scouts to roll back LGBT-friendly policies, and they’ve caved. Along with that, other changes include waiving fees for children of members of the military, dropping a citizenship merit badge, and adding a military merit badge.
They don’t appear to be planning a new organization, they’ll just co-opt the BSA.
Build up yourself
There are truancy laws. Private schools can have speech rules, but parents are free to choose such schools, and so free speech rights are not an issue.
This bill would also apply to private schools receiving money under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Nobody is forced to attend private schools.
It's a fundamental difference.
Federal funding. States and districts are free to fund whatever they want.
> Interracial marriage isn't going away either
But more generally, all those little book bans in various forms, explicit anti-diversity and xenophobic rules, undermining the right to vote for the specific groups of citizens, etc. add up and point in a specific direction. There are quite a few popular people who would be up for a theocracy, and a lot of openly fascist people down with the brutally repressive part. Consider how the sexual content in the Bible doesn't normally get included in those laws - like it's not the sexual content that's actually the target here...
Nothing happens out of nowhere. We're at "concentration camps are accepted by many people" level at the moment. The direction of government is obvious, the speed and possible success are still up for debate.
And you somehow changed the "concentration camps" to "prison camps for people in the country illegally". I meant exactly what I wrote.
To be fair, that depends on what the poster meant by "to be targeted". The list looks like it implies banning or criminalizing, but again, no one is being banned or criminalized under the legislation we are discussing.
PS. Damn son, you put your LinkedIn out there for everyone to see too? https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-msu
You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.
Go ahead and try to distinguish this from de jure financial penalties. If you get cited for speeding, that's definitely a fine, right? But the money then goes into the same general fund as other tax revenue. We're not even consistent in what we call this. The "tax" on cigarettes is clearly a penalty intended to deter usage, the proponents openly admit to it. The federal tax code is absolutely riddled with rules that cause you to pay a different amount based on whether you do or don't do something. The debates about which forms of taxation to use are fundamentally about which activities we want or don't want to be disincentivizing -- witness the people who openly express the intention to tax the rich specifically as a penalty for having too much money. Meanwhile the Georgists think we should use Land Value Tax instead of penalizing people for working.
The penalties for doing something look like you paying them when you do it. The penalties for not doing something look like them paying you when you do it. But because they don't actually have any of their own money, it's never actually them who is paying you, which means that everyone who "gets paid" (i.e. isn't penalized) is extracting that money from the penalties paid by everyone else. Who wouldn't have had to pay that both in the case where they did the thing required to avoid the penalty and where the government offered no such disincentive for not doing it by not collecting the money in taxes and other fines.
You're trying to make an exception out of the person who is actually paying $0 in all taxes, but to begin with that is extremely uncommon, e.g. good luck directly and indirectly avoiding property tax if you live indoors, or avoiding indirectly paying federal income tax if you eat food or consume any other goods or services. It's pretty plausible that such people don't really exist, and even if some did, the penalty still applies to everyone else.
And even for the hypothetical person who somehow directly and indirectly paid actual zero in all taxes, if they stop doing the thing, their personal finances still see the same disincentive as everyone else -- they still get penalized for not doing it. If we had a UBI and then someone got cited for speeding but the speeding fine was less than the UBI, would you say that they aren't being penalized for speeding? No, because if they hadn't gotten the citation they would have gotten more. And so it is with not doing something.
The reason this is important is that there are things the government isn't supposed to punish you for doing, meaning they're not to give you any disincentive of any kind. Offering you money -- which for substantially everyone in real life is actually their own money -- and then taking it away if you do the thing they're not allowed to punish you for doing, is punishing you for doing it.