How Each Pillar of the First Amendment Is Under Attack

Re:How Each Pillar of the First Amendment Is Under Attack by kelseyfrog on Monday March 31, 2025 @02:52PM (#43538400)

So what's happening here is that there is a group who is banning books and then doing language policing because it has bad optics. What everyone else is hearing is, "Conditional banning isn't banning" which isn't a coherent argument.

It's pretty clear that if the books they are banning from these places were unconditionally banned they wouldn't go to bat for them. Rather the sentiment would be "that's good actually." It doesn't take a genius to recognize that the playbook is to make incremental advances and argue over definitions in order to achieve this goal.

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Re:How Each Pillar of the First Amendment Is Under Attack by DeepSeaTortoise on Thursday April 03, 2025 @04:01PM (#43574659)

> "Conditional banning isn't banning" which isn't a coherent argument.

It absolutely is a coherent argument and you know that.

"Unconditional availability" inherently excludes "banning" and also "conditional banning" but the latter is a mere subset of "banning". Denying the distinction of the sub- and its superset is extremely intellectually dishonest when that's what the entire argument hinges on.

When I dump hundreds of tons of a book into a river a day and the government requires me to stop doing that, it's not banning the book from the people living downstreams, even despite the availability of the book being reduced for them.

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