Censorship is the oldest cheapest trick of the Lazy
More freedom of think, please.
I insist.
There’s nothing new about book banning and book burning. Ultra-conservative religions have been at the forefront in many decades, trying to keep anything about sex, sexuality, the ‘proper’ roles of men and women in families and societies defined by them and them alone. People of different faiths and beliefs along with non-believers are labelled as godless or heretic or - in the case of ‘foreigners’, indigenous tribes like Native Americans or immigrants - as heathens.
Science teaches us that all living things breathe, ingest, digest, excrete and reproduce. Only two of them are considered ‘nasty’, ‘unmentionable’ or ‘sinful.’ Thus teaching accurate biological science is, in itself, sinful. Numerous scientists like Galileo and Isaac Newton have been excommunicated, shunned and even physically harmed and killed by religious zealots.
Political leaders have also used similar messaging, in part for the same reason that preachers and Popes do: to maintain and increase their own influence and power. If their subjects and constituents are unhappy with some condition - often due to money matters and emergency situations - demonizing and scapegoating others is an easy way to deflect blame. If they can redirect attention to any available bogeyman, proclaim them under the influence of a devil nobody’s laid eyes on, they can declare war on something or someone else while rallying fearful people to their side by inciting greater fear.
When teens and young adults started dancing faster or with hips gyrating like Elvis, the burning of records followed. Only savages - like Black people were called - would dance like that, per the leaders advocating intolerance that only benefited the leaders.
The human race exists because of all 5 things that living things do. Hormones change us with puberty and change us with menopause with the years in between when women and men are at maximum fertility. Most living organisms do these things in broad daylight but humans are generally outlawed from doing so. Because???
Before reliable contraceptives existed, one obvious concern was unintended and unplanned pregnancies. A hundred years ago, some women considered it sinful to mention thighs and ankles, preferring the more generic term ‘leg’. Most western religions also required women to wear hats, scarves or other head coverings to enter churches, chapels, temples, etc.
It’s absolute nonsense. Such rules are always designed to establish so-called superiors from lessers. Women are to be shunned because they menstruate (therefore are unclean) even though the process is actually cleaning out organs to maximize the odds of successful conception. And if a male and female are unmarried, they’re both sinning, though the ones bearing all the disgrace and punishment are usually the women. After all, they ‘tempted’ the man because male sexuality is ‘normal’ but women’s sexuality is not. Biology disagrees.
The evidence is clear: the best way to limit unintended pregnancy is teaching people how reproduction works and making contraceptive choices widely available. Yet every time civilizations advance to understand that, some ministers will find some sexual behavior different from the majority of sexual behaviors, declare it sinful and find some rationale in their scriptures to justify fresh discrimination.
Which is not to suggest that behavioral scientists always get it right. Homosexuality, for example, was classified as a mental illness not many decades ago. Why? Because it was not studied or understood. It was censored and not spoken of in the US. But in many societies around the world, a lot of sexual behavior was well -known, spoken of, and accepted.
Some limits on sexuality do make sense. Pregnancy is a huge strain on a body. A newborn disrupts a mother’s life and with a lot of child labor laws in effect, both the teen mother and father can find it impossible to support and raise the child. It’s a common expectation that the first goal for our children beyond survival is to educate them till they’re at least 18, so an earlier pregnancy can create huge impediments to learning and to future income.
Full brain development doesn’t occur till near 25 years of age, when critical thinking skills can overcome impulsive decisions. Almost everyone can look back on dumb mistakes they made as an inexperienced teen or in early adulthood. In most states an arbitrary age of 18 has been set as ‘old enough to give mutual consent’ to sex.
Without going into every detail of the lines drawn for ‘normalcy’ versus ‘deviant’ sexual behavior, most of the lines drawn by successful and stable societies occur from study and cumulative experience, not via superstition and enforced ignorance. In earlier, largely agrarian societies, for example, having lots of children meant more affordable farmhands to gain the best harvests, so large families made practical sense. That need shrank in industrial and technologically advanced societies. Coupled with advances in medical and nutritional sciences, a birthrate that matches or slowly exceeds the death rate is all that’s required for a society to continue its existence.
So it’s normal to see advanced societies get an increase in their median ages as maturity, wisdom and knowledge increase.
Societies whose leaders restrict learning find it difficult to lower infant mortality or increase the health of elders. So in Japan (48.6 years median age), the European Union countries (44.0), the US and China (38.4-38.5) and many others, there’s a lot of collective wisdom and economic stability. In much younger societies like Niger (14.8 years median), Somalia (18.5), Iraq (21.2), Pakistan (22.0), and the Philippines (24.1), the collective wisdom is considerably less, the impulsiveness and emotionalism of the young adults permits their leaders to direct their societies in more autocratic ways, with more restrictions on education and knowledge. Sexual abuse is more common, civil liberties are less common, promotion of hostilities/violence/terrorism is more common and higher birthrates are more common. They cannot sustain as countries if their younger ages of death exceed the birth rates.
In our multi-ethnic society, some leaders advance fears like ‘white replacement theory’ if they observe an ethnic minority with a higher birthrate than whites and Caucasians from Northern Europe. Even though the white majority will remain the majority in most of the US for many decades to come. And… SO WHAT if our citizenry changes in skin pigmentation over time? Education and maturity create stable and successful societies not some skin hue, eye shape or degree of hair curliness.
There’s no reason to quarrel with whatever faith one subscribes to if it nurtures, grows or consoles them about the reality of death at the end of this life we know. But when that faith repels common reason, that faith has been distorted by human bias with unhealthy results. What God of any religion instructed that one can achieve some post-mortal success via something one is born with, like skin color? Would such a god deign that only blue eyes are a ticket to heaven?
And when someone questions a minister about something unfathomable that neither religion nor science has fully explained, the fallback position that ‘God works in mysterious ways’ is a copout best replaced by a simpler, more honest ‘I don’t know’.
If any God thought that whiter skin was preferable, why do other skin colors exist at all? It’s a mystery! God loves confusing us and punishing everyone darker because deal with it, neener-neener.
I know, that’s a long way to get to the point that the real motives of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are based on one thing: getting elected President by the easiest means available. Could he help resolve the major war being waged on Ukraine? Can he help defeat the covid pandemic? Bring fuel costs down or tame inflation? Cure cancer? Reduce the motivations of some to commit crime? Create more affordable housing or make healthcare more affordable till everyone has fair access to it? New ideas and fresh solutions take time and effort.
It’s much easier to mandate limits on what young people learn, to deny the longterm effects of racism and please that significant part of the base that got under Donald Trump’s umbrella. Rather than aiming for solutions that could attract fresh faces to his umbrella, he thinks it’s easier to hijack the ignorant and hateful part of Trump’s base. And he’s right. It’s easier. But that easy route gains nothing for any segment of society except Ron DeSantis and a very few big donors funding his campaign.
Claim the colleges are teaching students that some white people in our country did damage to Black people for centuries and that’s a fake ideology called ‘Woke’. Don’t permit books with gay people in them to be within reach of young readers in any classroom or library because that might make them think that it’s acceptable to be gay like the senior Republican Senator of South Carolina is. DeSantis has no interest in explaining away discrepancies and hypocrisies. Politicians work in mysterious ways!
Except there’s no real mystery about the way he cheapens lives, promotes hate and intolerance and prefers to keep a key part of his base undereducated. He doesn’t like to think a lot and is incapable of doing work that’s hard. He’s copying the Trump playbook of spreading unreasonable fears without doing the Trump crime part yet and without doing anything heroic or beneficial yet.
He has effectively closed school libraries and public school classrooms to permit any books at all to be read. Until some authorized school official reads the book and approves it. It’s not just the history and biology books being blocked. For months or years to come, it’s pretty much all of them.
In the past, English teachers knew that reading anything improved thinking skills and encouraged curiosity that leads to further learning. So even comic books were fine as part of the readings.
Amanda Marcotte writes for Salon:
A similar game is being played with the "vetting" language. Book ban supporters can claim they're not banning books because, in theory, books can be "vetted" and restored to the shelves. Of course, this is how all book bans throughout time have worked. They rarely, if ever, cover all the books all the time. But even when books are finally released to potential readers under a "ban first, ask questions later" system, the message is sent: Books are presumed inherently dangerous. Instead of being glad that a child is reading a book, the system treats every child with a book as suspicious. Policies like this have a ripple effect, recasting reading not as a social good but a threat to be strictly regulated.
Oooooooooh, those scary books! Blocking them will make your rent affordable, lower the cost of insulin and gasoline, prevent Vladimir Putin from invading other countries, end the addiction to prescribed painkillers, repair our crumbling bridges, prevent the lynching of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, eliminate the dastardly Mexican drug cartels, teach our women to stay home to feed and screw their underlaid white husbands and get the middle class to pay for all the things again that the top 2/10ths of earners don’t ever want to pay.
And Ron DeSantis really thinks the majority of American adults are dumb enough to believe this bullshit. Because he’s too lazy to develop any actual solutions.
Talents Who Should Have Been Better Known
“Money (That’s What I Want)”
”Stay In My Corner”
”I Heard It Through The Grapevine”
”War”
”Cloud Nine”
”Ball of Confusion”
”Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone”
”Stand Up And Cheer For The Preacher”
”Smiling Faces Sometimes”
”I Wish It Would Rain”
”I Can’t Get Next To You”
”Psychedelic Shack”
”Just My Imagination”
Songs from the 1960s and 1970s made famous by The Dells, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Edwin Starr, Marvin Gaye, Creedence Clearwater Revival and especially, The Temptations, among others.
The first hit song for Motown was recorded by the singer/songwriter/pianist who wrote or co-wrote all those powerful hits. He began singing in a Detroit middle school where his classmates included another prolific songwriter, Lamont Dozier, and Aretha Franklin.
He was humble and self-deprecating and was one of the best liked people in Motown. He avoided interviews as he didn’t want something he said to have an impact on the friendships he’d made through the years. He and his writing partner, Norman Whitfield, received lifetime achievement awards from the National Academy of Songwriters in 1990 and he told the LA Times: “We wrote maybe 300 songs, and we had 12 good ones,” he said. “So 288 were bad ones.”
During the Vietnam War, Berry Gordy instructed Motown songwriters not to write protest songs but this duo were the only ones who successfully produced political/social protest songs despite those orders.
His name was Barrett Strong. He died on January 28th, just 8 days shy of his 82nd birthday.
Don’t let Governor DeSantis know I told you that.
An old newsman yesterday, Feb 1st :
And just before I published this, I discovered he wrote far more on the topic yesterday.
Also, as regards the majority of this country - its women - on January 31st a resolution was introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. It’s something I’ve been advocating for the past 6 years and now that 38 states have ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, it’s time to make sure it amends the Constitution.
It was first proposed 100 years ago. An arbitrary and unusual deadline was placed on the process a few decades ago and the simple procedural action of removing that deadline would ensure its passage and make it the 28th Amendment.