> Just to remember that a few decades ago, same kind of persons were stating that books and free press are responsible for all of the moral corruption of the society

I think you’re quite confused on this point.

I don't think the previous commenter is confused at all.

For example, the Catholic Church established its Index of Prohibited Books way back in 1560, and it remained in effect until 1966.

(this is not a criticism of the Catholic Church specifically, mind you... most faiths had similar restrictions, and many still do).

Sure, and those are not “the same kind of people” with the same motives nor rationale nor basis in knowledge as the people advocating for constraints around social media in the present day.

There are religious bookbanners today and they have very little overlap with the anti-social media crowd.

> There are religious bookbanners today and they have very little overlap with the anti-social media crowd.

I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on that. To me it doesn't matter whether there's any actual overlap between the groups. It's the censorious impulse they share. Believing that they have the right to make this type of decision for others is what makes them the "same kind of people".

Presumably people who use the law to oppose distribution of child pornography are the “same type” then too, right?

A censorious impulse is a censorious impulse, after all!

Obviously you can use whatever taxonomy of people you want, but yours seems like an extremely esoteric and rather useless one.

Don't give yourself a hernia setting up that straw man, dude.

Hey you offered the framework!

What about people opposed to allowing non-doctors to call themselves doctors?

There are a million examples of “censorious impulses” you would not lump in with these, ergo the taxonomy is a bad one.

> Hey you offered the framework!

I did nothing of the sort. You're trying to set up a classic slippery slope fallacy and I'm not going to play that game.

Me: I think alcohol prohibitionists are meddling busybodies. You: Oh, well, I guess you think there's nothing wrong with injecting babies with pure grain alcohol starting at birth.

Me: I think furnaces and central heating are wonderful inventions. You: Oh, well, I guess you think it's okay to go around setting houses on fire.

That's how the game is played. I stopped being impressed by it decades ago. Likely before you were even born.

Bye now!

> Believing that they have the right to make this type of decision for others is what makes them the "same kind of people".

There is a major political party in the US wanting to dismantle education https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

Well the education system certainly needs attention and a refactoring. I don't think anyone can dispute that. The details of what the end goal looks like vary wildly based on who you talk to.

“Refactoring”… I beg you, stop conceptualizing fixing social problems as moving blocks of code around.

Disgusting and scary as it is, this is in no way part of the mainstream GOP

The Heritage foundation is absolutely the mainstream GOP.

What is the mainstream gop? They seem to be electing people who are all about these extreme positions.

I would be extremely careful to dismiss this out of hand. The group includes a large number of people from the Trump administration team, and the main purpose of the plan is to reform the government through loopholes/grey area means to consolidate power in the executive branch - thereby allowing rapid and sweeping changes throughout the government as a whole. Trump would love that, and has sung the praises of dictators and openly said he plans to be a dictator "on day one".

The system isn't designed to handle anything like that, and a ton of damage could be done by a concentrated effort from a group that intentionally refuses to play by the rules/norms.

What? This is as close as you’ll get to a Trump campaign platform.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. The article you linked says they plan to remove federal involvement in education, delegating that responsibility back to the states. From my perhaps naive viewpoint, decentralizing government education seems like it would allow more competing ideas and approaches into classrooms. It's not clear to me why this approach would dismantle education.

Why do you think this approach would dismantle education?

Because we’ve done it before and it yielded segregation, embedding of (one) religion in schools, and gigantic gaps in educational attainment based on where a child happened to be born.

Is it that hard to foresee what’ll happen if Louisiana et al started teaching children that the earth is 6000 years old, evolution is a farce, the US is a Christian nation, and also don’t worry about learning much outside of our immediate local (failing) economy?

It would be interesting to see if much of that has changed since the DoE was created in 1980. Do schools in Louisiana currently not teach that the earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a farce, and that the US is a Christian nation? Do we no longer have gigantic gaps in educational attainment based on where a child happened to be born? Segregation is federally illegal, so the proposed decentralization would only apply to curriculum and funding. I have no idea how the centralization of the education system has positively or negatively affected education outcomes, so I don't find the outcome of decentralizing it again obvious.

By the way, it's sad that this needs to be written, but I'm commenting in good faith. Without any kids in the education system, and without having been through the education system in many years, I'm not up to date with the latest statistics. All I have to go on is the occasional anecdotes from the people around me, which seem to be largely negative, but which could also be based in fantasy. I recognize that I have these blind spots, which is why I'm asking these questions.

The demarcation line here is 2012 though, and I wouldn't say material wise things made a sudden shift between 2008 and 2015. Arguably things were worse back then with the GFC while this decade has seen incredible returns for investors.

I agree. The world as we knew it ended with 9/11 and the new one has been made progressively worse ever since; mostly because "the war on X" is currently a thing and requires you to give away some of your rights.

War on drugs was the 1980s.