Nothing's ever been ok in Florida. They do their own thing down there, and we stay far away from the crazyness. Each state is semi-independent with the federal/state separation of powers. It's good for vacation though.

I dunno. As the country bifurcates more and more, I'm thinking long and hard about if I want to travel to certain states. I'd rather as little of my money as possible be spent there.

Don’t worry, your federal tax dollars get routed to these states automatically.

I know how you feel. I refuse to go to Virginia since they don't accept my CCW permit from Florida.

I don't step in non-constitutional-carry states. The good thing is that, with the exception of basically Florida, there are no states I care to visit that don't already have it. The problem is traveling to those states. I'm temporarily a felon to get there, even though it is my right to keep and bear that handgun nationally. Beats me.

I will not contribute my money to a government that does not allow me my rights, and will also not disarm myself to make myself more of a juicy target just to temporarily sight-see. Not worth it. Plenty of pretty sights to see in the states that aren't ridiculous.

> and will also not disarm myself to make myself more of a juicy target

Are you the president of the United States? Are you a multi-millionaire? Are you openly a member of a gang or other criminal organization?

If not, then, quite plainly, you're not a target. Period.

Lol, one day I was riding my bicycle home, and had to pass through a very poor part of town in which I am a racial minority. My bike got a flat just that moment. Someone took notice of my weakness that I had to stop and fix the flat and that I was obviously not from the neighborhood. They put a gun to my head.

That disabused me of any notion I am never a target.

Hmm. Watch Active Self Protection on YouTube, and tell me that again.

You'd be surprised how often people get targeted for no reason / stupid reasons.

Frankly, I find that the people that oppose guns and concealed carry are usually the type that live in nice neighborhoods and make nearly six figures, where the opinion is invalid. So, basically the demographic of Hacker News.

How about this crazy idea that instead of bringing war to those nice neighborhoods, to try to make all neighborhoods better?

"Bringing war" is a misunderstanding of the point. It's to have the means to defend yourself if you become a victim. Not to initiate it.

I don't want to come off as a troll, but I honestly believe that a person can do both those things at the same time:

1. Do what you can to make all neighbourhoods better. (Donate to or volunteer at local organizations working to improve neighbourhoods, get to know your neighbours, vote for positive change, join neighbourhood watch, etc.)

2. Do what you can to protect yourself until Step 1 comes to fruition. (Avoid high-risk areas, maintain situational awareness, train in self-defense, carry self-defense tools, etc.)

> I will not contribute my money to a government that does not allow me my rights, and will also not disarm myself

Out of curiosity, do you ever travel out of your country?

If yes, how do you deal with the gun issue? If no, how do you feel about being locked within your national borders?

The US is a big and varied place. One could certainly spend an entire lifetime here and not feel left out of much. And I say this as someone with a meager but existent share of international travel under my belt.

US has no bilateral extradition treaty with Syria. So I can answer for that one. I carried a gun anyway.

Honestly it wouldn't be too difficult to obtain one most places. Hard in europe but since it's a rich continent very easy to 3d print an FGC-9 or something. At various times I have thought about permanently emigrating and Austria and other places with liberal carry laws I find most interesting.

I personally don't feel the desire to visit other countries. If it's not somewhere I'd want to live, it's not somewhere I really care enough about to see. I care more about experiences and knowledge, both of which can be had where I live.

It helps that my state is also comparable in size to larger European countries. And has a pretty dynamic environment. Very mountainous and foresty in the north, planey in the east, red desert to the south, and tan desert to the west. Blazing hot in the summer, and well below freezing in the winter. I still haven't seen the majority of just this state.

Being rather varied in nature, the U.S. is still just one country. It is culturally more diverse than some places, but that's still mostly one culture, one way of living, one way of thinking about things. Since you can't leave, you're confined to it and have no way to experience other cultures.

I guess that does not bother you, but what are your thoughts on this anyway?

A lot of people are under the impression that public schools are a disaster in this country unless you're in a high performing school district. Either buy an expensive house or try to make enough money to send your kids to private school. So, no, public schools are not okay here, regardless of your view on this law.

It is designed that way.

Instead of taking property tax money, pooling it, then evenly dividing it across a state. The way most states are designed is that property tax is given to the local school district, meaning that areas with cheaper homes get less money than areas with more expensive homes. This is made worse by demographic problems associated with poverty which makes teaching poor kids more expensive than rich (e.g. ESL, food poverty, unstable households, behavioral issues, untreated mental health problems, etc).

There're three tiers: Private education, rich area public, and poor area public education.

The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem.

Actually fixing US schools amounts to "fix (or significantly mitigate) the US poverty-cycle problem", unfortunately. Unfortunate because if just funding poor schools like rich schools (Nb sometimes those funding levels are the opposite of what you'd expect, though—there are state and federal programs to funnel money to really, really bad schools) then it'd be straightforward and (relatively!) cheap to fix. The actual causes are more complex and would require far more "political will", as they say, plus a lot more money, to fix.

No. Lot's of money is sent to the school district where it then gets squandared into sports fields and administrator pay while the district cries to teachers that it doesn't have enough money to pay them more. Anyone thinking teachers are actually getting the money from these "funding increases" apparently doesn't know who is in control of that money. It's not teachers.

> No.

Yes.

The topic was leveling out district funding, not paying teachers more. Leveling out district funding might help a little, but it's not the main cause of bad schools/districts. Paying teachers more might help, but would also not do much for the worst districts. Those bad schools and districts are, to a large degree, merely symptoms of larger societal problems that schools aren't equipped, empowered, or intended to address.

The problems are in how our economy is structured, how our social safety net is scoped, funded, and arranged, how fallout from various racist older systems have affected the current state of the country, the justice system, and probably in certain socialized behaviors or attitudes (which are all tied up in those other things, anyway). You cannot turn a terrible district in a very bad part of the city, or awful, poor rural school districts, into good districts just by giving them more money, no matter what they spend the money on (unless you put the schools in charge of sweeping social reform programs, I guess, but I don't think anyone's proposing that and it's probably not the best way to administer such things).

The kids and the parents have problems the schools can't fix, and those affect school life in ways that put a ceiling on how well the schools can do, no matter how good the schools per se are. The main reason some districts or schools are better than others has more to do with selection bias than funding—schools with easy-to-teach kids do well, schools with hard-to-teach kids don't, and the reasons some kids are in one of those categories and others are in the other mostly aren't within the scope of what schools can fix, period.

Rich districts aren't good mainly because they have more money on account of high house prices, but because high house prices and (sometimes) other circumstances (car dependency, commute range) select for kids with stable, comfortable home lives, parents who value education and are themselves educated, and little criminality or blatantly anti-social behavior in (at least) their immediate family & friend circle—because absence of those qualities in home-life tend to correlate with poverty, so, with not being able to afford to move to districts with expensive housing. The house prices are an important part of the reason, but not (mainly) because they enable higher tax revenues.

> The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem.

I disagree. When poorer areas have worse student:teacher ratios while paying teachers less, and giving them the most challenging students, it is absolutely about the money.

Even if teachers are willing to take on a bigger challenge, we're also asking them to take a pay cut to do so which isn't reasonable.

Our very worst local district pays far more than the rich suburban districts and has for many, many years. The schools remain hair-raisingly dangerous and totally ineffective at their jobs. They are also terribly dysfunctional at this point, but that's an outcome of being given an impossible task—fix that completely and they'll just become dysfunctional again after a while.

We can and should fix the money issue, but it's barely gonna move the needle on outcomes. I wish it would because, again, that's a pretty simple fix in the scheme of things, but it won't. The causes are much deeper and would be much harder to address.

Kind of what happens when your school funding is based on local tax revenues

There were some books that some segment of voters didn't approve of that certain school libraries were providing. This seems like a backdoor way to stop that while bypassing having to go through controversial school board meetings and/or 1A constitutionality issues to block those books.

Not to say this isn't insane, just explaining how I think it happened.

> There were some books that some segment of voters didn't approve of that certain school libraries were providing.

I mean, so? This is small minority of people we're talking about. Why do they get veto power over everything present in the classroom? It's the teachers' job to teach the kids, manage/provision the classroom, etc.

At some point you have to just tell people "No".

If a law is passed the presumption under democracy is it has the assent of the majority.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of democracy, but you're looking at it.

To be clear, this isn't democracy, it's republicanism. Laws get passed in republicanism all the time that the majority of the people don't agree with, because their representatives aren't actually representing their interests.

If the government doesn't have the assent of the people is it not illegitimate? I thought the whole presumption under our system was the representatives have the assent of the majority.

I still remember that in 2010, the approval rating of US Congress was 10%, and yet 90% of incumbents was reelected. How the hell is that possible?

I think it is because their state's congressman they think is acting in their interest, while the other states' congressman are not. And they're not wrong...

Personally I also find it bizarre system where the majority vote of the other 49 states tells your state what to do, under federal law, particularly in wholly intrastate matters.

A lot of federal-law-telling-states-what-to-do is not tied to criminal punishment, but rather financial punishment. Federal taxation basically permits the US government the first share of our income. The US government then chooses to redistribute large chunks of money back to the state government, but only as long as it plays by the rules. So states can either play by the rules, or have to make up that money by essentially double-taxing their residents.

I'm sure states would love to just take that money in directly, but the federal government gets first dibs and states complete with each other on the remaining taxation. For instance, Florida is not just a popular retirement spot for the weather -- it also has zero income tax and a property tax with capped year-over-year growth.

"Congressional approval rating" is a dumb and misleading stat and I hate that it's reported on so much, especially in contexts like comparing to to e.g. the President's approval rating.

Maybe you love your representative and Senator(s) but your party is in the minority. So, you don't approve of Congress.

Maybe ditto on the liking your reps, but Congress is always doing really stupid shit even when your side's in charge (like the goddamn own-goal "debt ceiling" bullshit) simply because they can't rally enough support to make that junk stop, so you don't approve of Congress. Or maybe your side controls both houses and the Presidency but still can't do jack-shit because of Senate rules, or because some other Senator or two (not yours) in your preferred party like playing both sides to advance their state's interests at the expense of everyone else—so you don't approve of Congress.

Maybe you like your reps and your side is in charge but you've really taken anti-politician stand-up jokes to heart, or follow media that highlights and exaggerates all the stuff you hate about reps on the "other side" even when yours is in charge, so you tick the "disapprove" box.

And so on.

To make an extreme example, let's say that 99 senators are great and everyone loves them, but 1 senator is terrible and the rules of the Senate happen to allow filibusters. You could have a situation as a result where 98-99% of people approve of their senator, but a small minority approves of the overall output of the Senate.

If you can get your population to believe that the other choices are literally demons trying to condemn them to hell, it's an easy fear based decision for uneducated voters.

There are plenty of people in the US that will agree that the current federal government is almost entirely illegitimate. That majority of things our government currently does are not powers granted to it in the Constitution.

There is a massive corrupting temptation of corporate money for all members of congress. We might elect somebody that we believe will represent us but ultimately they are swooned by the siren song of fat sacks of cash. However, I think more often than not, the people that get elected spent the most money on their campaign. The majority of money spent of campaigns comes from contributions that we are supposed to believe don't buy influence.

Whatever you feel about Matt Gaetz, his interview with Tim Pool illustrates the corporate influence issue we are up against.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q2dgVuS2QY

Republicans are generally much more moderate in their personal ideologies than what their representatives do. But it doesn't matter because they still vote them back into office no matter what.

"If a law is passed the presumption under democracy is it has the assent of the majority. "

Why would that be the presumption instead of, you know, looking at polls?

Because then you would realize the whole charade about the social contract and consent to be governed under the law all falls apart and there is nothing left but whether you decide to defend against the violence of enforcement.

You do you, but I'd think most people can look at poll data without the accompanying feeling of existential dread.

> This is small minority of people we're talking about.

This group of people you are talking about are well organized to take action on anything that aggrieved them. It just so happens that they are aggrieved by anything that isn't explicitly what they believe. Instead of accepting that some may not agree with you, they believe that anyone not in agreement is wrong and must be stopped at every turn.

Exactly. This law is fucked, but of course progressives will take no responsibility for scaring the shit out of voters with their equally dystopian agenda they’re pushing on kids.

If you just keep pushing even when a majority of the population makes it clear they want you to stop they aren’t going to just give up. The divide in this country is not looking to get better any time soon.

What is dystopian about the alleged "progressive agenda" here?

Mental health metrics have been declining for adolescents, and things like global warming anxiety and gender dysphoria are increasing in a way that some think is socially mediated and counter productive.

"Liberals aren't ignoring climate change enough and it's harming children" is certainly one take...

equally dystopian agenda? One side is removing all books that aren't on a whitelist.

Am I mistaken in understanding that this “White list” is actually a large collection of white lists, and each district’s librarians curate their district’s list?

Wouldn't that be even worse? A teacher could get a felony for having a book that their neighboring school can read. Hyper local laws being felonies sounds incredibly dangerous. How often are the lists updated and how likely is it for the teacher to be operating on the correct list?

I oppose “progressive” censorship just as much.

"Equally dystopian"... how exactly?

> equally dystopian agenda they’re pushing on kids

Please elaborate.

Progressives are not responsible for the actions their opponents choose to take, or the justifications they use when taking them.

Yeah, I thought the GOP was all about freedom?

People forget there are more than one kind of freedom.

Example: I believe states should be small, physically, so their laws are relevant locally. But since several megacountries do exist, I prefer those countries to have "freedom" in the sense where locals can do whatever laws are relevant to them, even if those local laws include censorship or other nonfree things.

Under this definition everything is freedom, you just get to pick your scale. "Freedom" in the sense that a dictator is free to pick whatever laws they feel like that day, even if it includes subjugation and other nonfree things.

That hasn’t been the case since Lincoln died.

(Not that the other party is much better)

Let's not pretend both parties are equally bad. There is a lot wrong with the Democratic Party, and with the US political system in general, but the Republicans rushing to turn the US into a fascist dystopia. There are degrees of bad, and the GOP is significantly worse at this point.

"I'm hitting you because you made me do it" certainly seems to be a popular take among social conservatives.

Politicization of schooling, particularly party-political school board elections, is setting up conflict between teachers (who are seen as a natural liberal constituency) and some people who seem to have drunk particularly deeply of the anti-woke koolade.

It really does look truly weird from out here. I mean, I'm living in the UK, where some seriously bad shit is going down, but even given all o that, stuff in the US looks pretty dark...!

It’s Florida. And, no, things aren’t okay.

Florida gets a bad rap. Their Sunshine Law[0] has them voluntarily offering their dirty laundry to the public to keep themselves accountable. Only an ignorant or a jealous fool would call that a bad thing. You have to truly be living in 1984 to want your government to hide more things from you.

[0]https://floridadep.gov/sites/default/files/FloridaSunshinePu...

1) Small time offenders should probably be given the same dignity and privacy as other people. There's no reason to believe allowing people to turn a police blotter into weekly entertainment is a positive thing.

2) This is about the state government doing things. Florida's different criminal disclosure laws have no relevance here. Florida is fucky because florida's state government is run by a narcissist who wishes he was a dictator.

Plenty of other states aren't far behind.

Conflating Spain with events in another European country, as if the EU (of which Ukraine isn't even part of) were comparable to the United States, is ridiculous. You clearly have no grasp of history or geography, let alone modern politics.

Came here to say pretty much this. Conflating two states in a nation with two different nations in the EU isn’t exactly the best way to say “everything is ok here”.

> Conflating Spain with events in another European country, as if the EU (of which Ukraine isn't even part of) were comparable to the United States, is ridiculous

This is exactly my point, my dude. You clearly can't read well

No, your point is that lumping New York and Florida together is comparable to lumping Spain and Latvia together. That is definitely not the case. Completely different histories, languages, and governing structures.

Analogies are often terrible because they just shift the conversation to identifying the differences and similarities in the two sides of the analogy and arguing about their relevance or lack thereof. That may lead somewhere eventually, but probably not, and certainly not efficiently.

A good analogy illustrates a different way of viewing something that not all readers might have considered, rather than simply asserting that two things are equivalent in the given context.

Edit: Also, I am American, so I hope you can curb your European-focused hatred when reading my comment.

Yikes! Please don't break the site guidelines like this. We ban accounts that post this way, or this way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34490527

or this way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123658

I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things and this doesn't seem to be a repeated habit, but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate, we'd appreciate it.

It's not up to Governor approval and a felony is a bad overcorrection, but have you looked at the books that prompted this?

Most cases defending basic freedoms involve reprehensible facts. In the US, Miranda was a burglar. Clarence Brandenburg was a KKK leader. Paul Cohen wore a t-shirt reading "FUCK THE DRAFT" at a time when such words weren't part of polite public discourse.

The only thing worse than a law against your definition of "bad" content is a law against your definition of "good" content. Which will be next if this law moves the Overton window.

Which is why it's dangerous to focus on the actual content being regulated. Be upset that content -- any content -- is being regulated, because the US Bill of Rights is supposed to prohibit such laws.

This is a motte-and-bailey fallacy [0], using the (easy to defend) argument "we shouldn't give obscene material to 8-year-olds" to justify the (indefensible) argument that "no material that any parents find ideologically reprehensible should be made available to any children through the school system".

Note that nobody in this thread defending the policy has been able to name any of these porn books that have been given to children, and that none of them attempt to defend the ramifications of the policy as implemented.

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

(Posted elsewhere in the discussion, but that ended up being on a dead thread)

There is a strong movement afoot to define any material teaching about

1) consent (whether it mentions sex or not)

2) the child's own body (in ways designed to help them recognize and avoid things like sexual abuse)

3) queer issues of any kind, but especially trans issues

as pornographic, regardless of the actual content, so that they can ban it and claim they're saving the poor children from horrible, horrible sexual material.

This is not a new movement; conservatives have been trying to ban queer people from any kind of public visibility for decades by claiming that their very existence is sexual, ignoring the fact that heterosexual romance and sex is being shoved into our faces constantly, often in far more blatant ways, and often in media explicitly aimed at children. They're merely redoubling their efforts now that it's becoming clear that society at large is starting to genuinely accept trans people, which they cannot abide.

Remember that the conservative take for decades was "if we allow gays to marry, what's next, allowing dogs to get married? Or people to marry kids?"

Conservatives have been pushing to make being gay or trans or queer in any way to be morally equivalent or at least directly leading to pedophilia forever.

...And while I honestly never would have believed it a decade ago, it's becoming increasingly and horrifyingly clear just how much of that is naked projection. So much has come out recently about their complicity in both committing and covering up child sexual abuse, and yet due to the prevalence of Fox News and the advent of the "post-truth era", their base—who supposedly cares very deeply about that sort of thing—simply waves it off as at best a left-wing smear campaign, and at worst, well, one or two of them may have done some stuff, but that's nothing compared to Pizzagate, right??!

The reason for this is that a lot of the base has a "Strong man" centric world view, where a good thing is a thing done by a "good" person, meaning a good person can do no wrong and a bad person can do no right, while everything a "good" person does is by definition good.

This means that the people they follow and support can do an identical action to someone they hate, but the liked person does a good thing and the hated person does a bad thing in their eyes.

Take for example, epstein. Both Bill Clinton and Trump (among a hundred others) were clearly and publicly acquaintances of Epstein, however, to conservatives, clinton is a pedophile and trump is innocent.

Please tell me exactly which books are so heinous that having them present in schools merits felony charges?

I am very much against this law but I think "present in school" is much different than "curated."

I couldn't give a shit if kids were bringing Anarchist Cookbook and images of the tortures at Abu Dhabi prison to school. What the kid and his family obtain on their own through private means and choose to read in a public venue like a school IMO is none of my business.

If the teachers are curating books that disproportionately pushes certain non-academic agendas, though, then maybe the parents ought to have the right to guide the employment of that teacher to make sure it follows the desires of the voters. Criminal charges are insane though.

What you're describing very much isn't happening, though. These books indeed were merely "present in school" on a book shelf. Nobody's being indoctrinated into practical terrorism in Florida schools by being forced to read the Anarchist's Cookbook or anything like that.

If the books in the school library just appear there with no influence by the school staff in charge of the libraries then I guess we can just fire the library staff. Then there's no one there to risk a felony. I didn't realize it was completely non-curated and unmanaged in Florida.

Teachers regularly have their own collections of books in classrooms, separate from those held by the school library.

Are they completely non-curated? Kids just put whatever book they want there? If so I'd say the teacher isn't liable for what happens. If the teachers put the books or manages which books are there they are curated and that activity can be managed by the people paying the teacher, ie the taxpayers/representatives.

> and that activity can be managed by the people paying the teacher, ie the taxpayers/representatives

In this case, Florida has decided to manage that activity by making it a felony to merely happen to have a book on the shelf that's not on the pre-approved list.

Eh, I disagree. Teachers should be given some leeway in their pedagogy as long as they meet expectations.

There's also the fact that you're selecting for some of the worst teachers by confining them to curriculum and harshly punishing deviation or expansion. The best teachers are good precisely because they do those things, and if you take that away it's not the same job anymore—they're just reading a script and serving as a mouthpiece for the state rather than serving the students the best they can. That's not what they signed up for. They'll leave.

Check teacher forums, this kind of over-management and micro-management are major reasons for discontent in the job, and one of several factors pushing good teachers out of teaching.

He said: "...pushes certain non-academic agendas..".

Translation: Teachers are woke and shoving down the kids throat their political agenda.

No one has yet to name any books.

They know that the second they name any specific books that were actually present in classrooms, we'll all realize how ridiculous the outrage over such innocuous books actually is.

Books didnt prompt this, people did.

What countries do you feel are correct here?

Looking across the pond I see people being arrested for mean tweets and memes.

Seems rather further dystopian than a state mandating their public tax funded schools keep content neutral around divide topics - allowing parents to make their decisions.

To fill in some context...

This isn't about Governor approval. This was approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor. Not a mandate by them.

The context of all of this is teachers putting books in front of kids that their parents don't approve of.

I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an elementary school. Kids 10-ish and under. sex education doesn't come until the end of elementary school. If I understand it right, this was not an education book.

There is debate over whether this should be in the school and there are parents, politicians, and teachers on both sides of this.

What got Florida to this point is worth exploring and discussing. No matter what side you're on.

> I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an elementary school.

What book was it?

I ask because the first real science fiction book that I ever read, that inspired a life-long love for the genre, and which I read under the age of ten, was Rendezvous With Rama, which did contain a sex scene. And the presence of said sex scene didn't traumatize me or anything; I mostly just didn't understand it. Certainly not worth preventing me from having access to that book in its entirety over!

Great question! Because books like Catcher in the Rye get flagged for sexual content all the time.

Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the book. It was one I was not familiar with.

The discussion noted that the book discussed using "toys". They also noted that there was an add for buying sex toys as part of the book. These are elements that really caught my attention.

I have a hard time seeing most parents in the US being ok with this material being put in front of kids who are 5-10 years old.

“I don’t really recall but it was some terrible thing like giving sex toys to kids but I don’t remember really. I can definitely see why they’re doing this though!”

So what you're saying is, rather than have actual data or even a single concrete anecdote, you're happy just passing along word-of-mouth gossip when we already know that the people pushing for these laws are happy outright lying about their intent.

The thing about anecdotes about schools is that you actually can find examples of a lot of bad behavior—because there are lots and lots of schools and lots and lots of teachers and sometimes those teachers are malicious or are catastrophically stupid, just like any other group of people that large.

But when you dig a little farther most of that stuff's usually handled just fine at the school or district level. There's very little justification for involving state or even county level government in addressing things like inappropriate lessons or content, because they do happen but are not an actual systemic problem because they're already dealt with by the existing, very-local systems.

Just wanted to thank you for this astute point.

Popular science magazine has it's back several pages full of ads for sketchy dick pills, "romantic couple" porn videos, and other sex services. My mother got really upset but I just wanted to read about the B2 bomber so she pretty quickly realized that it was a non-issue.

The hilarious part is that young teens will find pretty much anything arousing anyway. When I was that age, one of the books in the Ender's Game series involved a weird scene where someone attempts to essentially seduce Ender. You can bet I re-read that scene a hundred times. Or a scene in a harry potter book where a couple young teens talk about making out.

If you want to prevent any "sexualization" content from reaching your young readers, you pretty much have to limit them to Go Dog Go.

There are almost zero teachers on the side of this, and the parents who favor censorship are in the extreme minority, whipped into a frenzy by cynical politicians in a country whose media and political system is clearly broken.

What's the example book? I doubt it's as black-and-white as you're making it sound. There are plenty of books with "sexually explicit material"* in them that are appropriate for children.

* e.g. the book my mom made me read about how our bodies change during puberty.

> A book with sexually explicit material

This raises the question of what is material considered sexually explicit. Do you have the title and author of this book?

If there was really widespread agreement that the book did not belong in the library, then it wouldn't have been there in the first place. What these laws do is enable tiny vocal minorities to wield censorship powers.

> widespread agreement

There isn't widespread agreement. That's how we got here. Parents are disagreeing with teachers as to what material they want in front of their kids.

The book I referred to earlier described using sex toys and had an add to get them. This is in a library for kids aged 5-10ish. People were arguing in support of the book being in that library.

Who gets to choose what's appropriate?

If you're going to keep making such claims, you really need to name the book.

While I'm sure at national scale it's fully possible to dredge up OH NO VERY SCARY EXAMPLES,

the overwhelming impetus and application of laws like this is to prevent religious autocratic conservative parents' kids from learning the actual nature of the secular (i.e real) humanist world,

most typically through canon and contemporary literature which does its job: illuminating the human condition, and the hypocrisy venality ignorance brutality and rigidity of people exactly like those who oppose such illumination.

Been telling my friends who e.g. foolishly moved to Austin or Florida chasing the "nest Silicon Valley": if you intend to, or have, kids, GTFO now. The descent of Texas and Florida into autocratic christofascism continues and raising a child, especially a young woman, there, would be actual hell

Can I correctly surmise that you're Canadian? If so, your leader declared a national emergency to squash free speech, banished handguns so you can no longer protect yourself, and cut off political opponents from the financial system. Trying to control the books children can view in an educational environment seems trivial by comparison.

Not that Canadian authoritarianism makes this FL issue any less ridiculous, but since you brought it up, I am kind of amazed that no one in a "modern democracy" (what I thought Canada was aiming for) had any problem with the alarming weaponization of the financial system against anyone who even donated to the trucker protests. In my mind, it was somewhat equivalent to a Republican-controlled US government freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated to Planned Parenthood and then was protesting the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade. It was an alarming abandonment by Trudeau's government of the principles that I would've assumed they were trying to uphold.

> Republican-controlled US government freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated to Planned Parenthood

I'm not familiar with this. Searches yield articles about freezing of Planned Parenthood funding. Could you point me in the right direction for more details?

It was an example of something comparable to what the Canadian government did, except with US conservatives as the aggressors.

"banished handguns so you can no longer protect yourself..."

I think this view has been quite comprehensively debunked by now. I for one do not want to live in a country where most people have access to handguns.

> banished handguns so you can no longer protect yourself

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...

We have an big propaganda issue that is being exploited by our national enemy's (I'm talking about you Russia). All this stuff that upsets our stable society is only good for our enemies. Nobody should care of what other people are reading, unless it poses a threat to our society. Talk about shouting fire in a theater.

I think it's a subtle form of white nationalism and American exceptionalism when you pretend that the most racist, backwards, destructive, Country on Earth couldn't have come up with every single one of these policies all on their own

How is this Russia's doing? Do you have a source for that claim?

Read as written, it seems like the parent is saying that things like this (felony for providing a child anything but whitelisted books) destabilize the society they occur in, and bad national actors exploit and encourage that instability. Not that Russia directly induced this law.

I just don't get the link to these idiotic policies put into place in places like Florida. Is Russia using Facebook or something to make people there believe dumb shit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_warfare "Russian interference in foreign elections Russian interference in foreign elections, most notably the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, has been described as information warfare."

Hey putin, you can downvote me all you want!

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic and ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Canada literally suspended its entire charter and its constitutional rights not even a year ago. But I guess we really like to sneer at the americans and project while looking the other way or coming up with excuses when we do much worse. The inferiority complex here in canada would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.