"I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."

What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf? Makes no sense, doubt it's true, and obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level, let alone content.

> doubt it's true

Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?

> obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level

I had a collegiate reading level in first grade... I taught myself to read at age 3 in order to escape my situation. I should not have to suffer because other people did not invest the same amount of time and energy into their literacy.

> What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf?

I learned about Hitler and why he was a massive piece of shit, but also formed my viewpoint while considering all available information and opinions, instead of just internalizing what other people told me.

Oh hi, I too was in the same boat with reading level.

> Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?

It's the internet, it's easy for people to make claims, and we have to use our own faculties to try to guess at the accuracy of these claims. These might not even be outright lies, but they could be exaggerations, partial truths, or simply misremembering (most people can't clearly remember things that happened to them when they were 6 years old).

You claimed both that the books available to you at your elementary school weren't advanced enough for your 6 year old self, and that your elementary school made Mein Kampf available to you. I'm not going to make a judgement on the veracity of your claims, but I will say that looking at both of your claims together, I'm entirely unable to tell what level of books your elementary school actually made available to students.

> You claimed both that the books available to you at your elementary school weren't advanced enough for your 6 year old self

I did not.

I said "I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7", and I also said "the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it". This does not imply that at 6/7 the books weren't cutting it. This conversation was about the role of the library throughout my schooling, and as I got older, I wanted more than the library could offer.

> I will say that looking at both of your claims together, I'm entirely unable to tell what level of books your elementary school actually made available to students.

Look again, with more precise reading comprehension.

You didn't address the actual issue. Looking at your claim:

"I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots."

and your claim:

"I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."

Even if we put aside the question about the veracity of your claims, we're still left with no clue about what was actually available at your elementary school. Apparently your school didn't have enough adult-oriented books...yet it also gave the kids access to Mein Kampf.

What actual issue didn't I address?

You're completely confusing reading level, historical significance with thematic content. "Mein Kampf" is not what I was looking for in reading material.

> Even if we put aside the question about the veracity of your claims

I don't care if you spend the rest of your life questioning my own experience; I don't question it, because I lived it, and after this conversation we'll never speak to each other again and I will continue to live my life.

> Apparently your school didn't have enough adult-oriented books...yet it also gave the kids access to Mein Kampf.

Can you understand the difference between Mein Kampf and other books and why Mein Kampf might not scratch that itch? After I read it, what, do I just read it again and again? No, I want more books. I read 2-4 books a week. I suffered extreme childhood abuse and reading was my escape.

You're not making any real points, just looking for a little gotcha moment so you can pat yourself on the back, looking for inconsistencies so desperately that you're willing to intentionally ignore the obvious in search of something else.

This isn't how you have a conversation with others.

It's not a difficult read. It's the historical context that's hard to get. The major political players of a century ago are mostly gone now.

In the early 20th century, there were still a lot of kings, emperors, and princes hanging onto power. The era of monarchy was on the way out, but it wasn't over yet. WWI started after an archduke was killed by an inept but lucky assassin. The ancient noble families still mattered.

The Marxists were quite active. They were the anti-monarchists. Today, Marxists are nearly extinct. There are still some Communist states around, but no Marxist mass movements.

The Catholic Church was still a major political power. That's gone.

Hitler was a competent craftsman and had done construction work. This was an era which required a huge number of people doing manual labor in big groups to get things done. That's when unions arise, by the way. "Working class" was very real, and that's where Hitler started. The term "macho" wasn't available yet, so he wrote: "In times when not the mind but the fist decides, the purely intellectual emphasis of our education in the upper classes makes them incapable of defending themselves, let alone enforcing their will. Not infrequently the first reason for personal cowardice lies in physical weaknesses."

There's a long rant about Jews, which seems to come from clerk jobs in the WWI German army being dominated by Jews, described as physically weak and overly intellectual. Today, that might be a rant about AI. There's a similar grumble about parliamentarians, elected legislators and their staffs, who talk too much and don't exercise enough. The ideal is a muscular, disciplined society run by strong working people. He writes approvingly of how the US exercises quality control on immigrants, rejecting the sick and weak ones.

Now, this is where a librarian can help. Someone reading this needs background reading on Europe from 1900 to 1925. Searching with Google for "The World in 1900" turns up a terrible essay on Medium that looks like LLM-generated clickbait. A good librarian will offer better choices.

Kids who get all that background will question the way things are today, of course. Which scares some people.

This is a gross misrepresentation of the text.

Anyway, there is absolutely no point to having such a text in an elementary school.

It should be required reading in high school so everyone can property understand the attitude that led to WW2. The only English translation worth its salt is the Dalton translation.

The best case for giving them Mein Kampf is that it's so tedious and boring, if you force kids to read it, they'll learn to hate Nazis early on.

Sorry that you had a bad childhood, but the answer to you, personally, having a bad childhood is not “the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.” Just consider things under Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance: would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?

> the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship

No, the State needs to get the fuck out of my business. That's the point.

> would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?

See the above. Providing protections for open access to information is translatable across both situations you've described. Access is access. Censorship is censorship.

This isn't about the "nuclear family". It's about me, an individual, and my inalienable rights for self-determination, regardless of what others around me want.

Make no mistake, I am not using my anecdotal experience as the basis for my beliefs. I am using it as supplementary evidence for why this is all so important. My heart goes out to every child who has been or is currently in the situation I faced growing up. I don't want them to be like me, holding a gun in their mouth with the finger on the trigger at the ripe age of 9, wishing to escape a seemingly unending violent war for control of my thoughts. The represented majority will never understand the struggle of the unrepresented minority.

A librarian (who is employed by and thus an agent of the state) giving children access to books with sexual content against the will of parents is definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.

I didn't have a parent-child relationship. I didn't live with my mother or father, they were mostly absent in my life after the age of four and I was homeless by 16, after seeking emancipation for many years earlier and my parents denying me.

And fuck "the will" of the people who raised me, they were extremely abusive and traumatized me in every way imaginable, including through sexual repression and agency to chose my own destiny and seek my own sources of truth, knowledge and creativity. They sought to enact a chilling effect by surveilling me at every level of my life, including through my school systems. They repressed nearly every creative outlet I engaged in, including programming or exploring computer literacy, fearing it would turn me homosexual or turn me into a "hacker".

When he wasn't punching me in the face me or throwing furniture at me, or beating me with a belt for hours until I stopped crying, because "men don't cry", my grandfather used to shake and choke me violently and tell me I was a demon and would never love anyone or be loved by anyone.

They were evil people and I do not support any institution or government which wants to perpetuate the experience I had for other children. I seek to enable children to have access to knowledge and tools they need to determine their own destiny, and I firmly believe that full access to information and supporting institutions will naturally lead to a more empathetic society than will restriction of information.

I’m sorry for your experience but your extreme case does not invalidate the right of normal parents to exercise guidance over their children and to decide when and to what types of books, movies, games, etc. they are exposed.

My experience is the edge case that people like you try to pretend either doesn't exist or doesn't matter when justifying the current system.

FWIW, the most egregious issues you’ve mentioned about your upbringing are physical and mental abuse and there are already mechanisms for the state to intervene in those cases and nobody in this thread is arguing against those. Now it so happens that your abusers also limited your access to information, but it’s not actually clear there’s anything wrong with that, which is why we’re arguing about it, but it’s certainly the case that the fact that you were physically and mentally abused as a kid is orthogonal to whether or not the state should intervene in matters of mere access to information.

Parallel really, not orthogonal. It's better that I cut off your internet than hit you with a hammer, but not much better.

Is cutting off a teen’s internet bad if they’re being bullied or groomed on social media?

Do you think if a teen is being bullied, cutting them off from the Internet will help?

It does. Because a child is a sentient being. Not an accessory for a parent. If you respect the autonomy of someone who is sentient, even when they're dependent on someone else, it's important they're given the ability to forge their own life.

And no, it's not an "extreme case" — it's a common one.

    Wildeman et al. estimated the lifetime child maltreatment prevalence for US children as 12.5% by age 18 years, but considered only child maltreatment reports substantiated by CPS.12 Substantiated reports are a small subset of all reports. In 2014, only 21.9% of investigated reports were substantiated.10 (Technically, “investigated” indicates “investigated or assessed” and “substantiated” indicates “substantiated or indicated” here and after.)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227926/pdf/AJPH.20...

1 in 5 is hardly uncommon. Note, these are the substantiated reports i.e. an investigation was done and it was found, "yes, the child is being abused."

But even if it was 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1,000 then we still can't design the system without this in mind, because any system needs to have a safety margin for failure, and that includes caring for children.

> definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.

That's the job of schools. Okay, it's not all about parents. We stopped allowing parents to do everything because, as it turns out, most of them are fucking stupid.

So we have public school, where real things are taught. And now, most people aren't illiterate. So, yay us!

But this notion that everything should always bend over backwards to cater to what parents want... uh no. This is some 2000s bullshit. This is not the way it worked before. If parents don't want their kids learning about X, Y, Z then their options are either getting over it or pulling their kids out of school to home school. Bending the public school to whatever their dumbass whim is, isn't an option.

And now my state has this bad boy: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/28/what-is-louisianas-...

"Louisiana is the first US state to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in schools. The law stipulates the following:

- Public schools are required to display a poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, school library and cafeteria.

- They must be displayed on a poster of minimum 11×14-inch (28×35.5cm) size and be written in an easily readable, large font."

Separation of Church and State, my ass.

They're not going to understand unless they lived here long-term. My friends in St. Martinville told me stories about Jeff Landry's (adoptive) family growing up choosing a different pharmacist because the one they went to not being cool with Vatican II was still too liberal for them.

Hopefully you can see the irony of, on the one hand, arguing that the state should have the right to intervene in the parent/child relationship wrt what information a child has access to and, on the other hand, complaining that the state is requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. The power you’re arguing for is the very same thing you’re complaining about.

There is no irony here, you're not understanding the context. It's never been against the law for a teacher to show them here in school. But now they're forced to, even if they personally disagree with displaying and perpetuating religion in their public school classrooms, when separation of Church and State is such a core component of our Constitution. A huge amount of our state was against this violation of free speech, but our governor signed it into law anyway.

The library is still a resource for those who wish to learn more about religion, and I certainly used it while learning about various religions that I was not allowed to research at home.

Here's the problem with your rather simple-minded analysis. Teachers and education administrations can be really fucking stupid too. I trust the parents way more.

> Teachers and education administrations can be really fucking stupid too.

Yeah, sure, they can be. The difference is that this is their JOB and they're EDUCATED.

If you trust parents "way more" than actual educators, then great! Pull your kids out of school and teach them yourself. That's always been an option. But don't go around proclaiming public school should be specifically engineered to make YOU comfortable.

You? Are nobody. Your opinion does not matter.

EDUCATED or indoctrinated? And you only have to look at the abysmal track record of the "Dept of Education" to see how badly things can be run. And yes I agree..my opinion is not that important, just like yours.

It's one thing for a librarian to call a teen over and say "hey, you should look at this book. It's full of ***." But if a teen wants to check out a book that has sexual content in it, then the librarian shouldn't prevent them. I think it would be prudent for the librarian to have a short conversation with the kid if they suspect the kid might be getting in over their head, but the kid can check out whatever they want.

I think checking out any* book, without a parent's explicit consent, is potentially subverting the parent/child relationship. Families are unique - there's no clear agreed upon standard of which books are "good" and which books are "bad." And without such a standard, it is, in my opinion, the library's responsiblilty to make literature and information as accessible as possible with few, if any restrictions. It's not the library's responsibility to choose which books are somehow "appropriate," that's the parents' job. And if kids are sneaking out to library behind their parents' back, idk, that seems pretty wholesome. Seems a lot better than sneaking cigarettes or booze or whatever.

I think the reasonable stance is for the state, in its various forms, to only expose kids to a (small c) conservative subset of what is widely agreed upon as factual and morally acceptable and to leave everything beyond that to parents. Kids aren’t under the purview of their parents forever; they’ll soon get out into the world and come to their own conclusions.

When you are a child you are not an individual. You are a child. What your parents want matters more than what you want.

No.

Yes, that's what my guardians told me, too. I contend otherwise. Now, who is right? On what foundation do you rest your claim that I lack the protections of an individual as a child?

Under Rawls' Veil of Ignorance I actually want the state to protect me as a child born into a random family that could happen to be abusive.

The context of this thread is access to information, so that was the implied context of my comment. But to be clear: I agree that the state is right to intervene in the parent/child relationship in cases of physical abuse.

But then the State is implicitly deciding morality by deciding what is and isn't abuse. It's engaging in censorship, and is subject to corruption, as was and is my government in the Deep South. It's actively hostile towards information.

Literally just last month, we as a city came together and narrowly avoided the city passing a sneak ballot that was going to remove a lot of funding from our public libraries and redirect it towards police retirement funds. They even tried to repress our vote by making it a parish-wide vote instead of a city-wide vote, inviting in people who were ignorant of the consequences of the ballot but easily swayed by local identity politics.

Libraries are in danger, and it's precisely because they provide things that our local governments, and the current rogue federal government which they massively support, and their generationally brainwashed constituents, don't want people like me and other pacifists and archivists to access and share.

Ah, I see you are in EBR parish. Congratulations from NOLA on voting down the proposal. We did our part with the constitutional amendments but I won't be in this state for much longer. I thought that EBR parish and BR city were coterminous however?

Hey, thanks, everyone was pretty nervous but we came together :)

There is Zachary, St. George, Baker, Central and Baton Rouge. This is one of the games these cities sometimes play in order to sway local elections. I too will be leaving the state again soon once things line up. I hope you find a community that you feel connected to.

Probably eastern seaboard - I have spent over a decade in New Orleans and while I love it I don’t think it really loves me back and I haven’t really developed deep long lasting ties beyond the family I already had here.

I meant abusive in the general sense, including overt restrictions in access to information.

My hypothetical parents behind Rawls' Veil should not be able to prevent me from learning about evolution to give a concrete example.

Are you willing to take the inversion of your position: that you should have no ability to control what information the state exposes your children to?

What about media with sexual content? Or content that promotes creationism or the idea that there are two biological sexes, which were created by God?

My position is balance between the family and the state for the maximal benefit of the child.

Also the balance should be towards access to information. There is no symmetry between exposure to harmful ideas and restricting good ones. With your example of two biological sexes created by God it is pretty easy to explain that the reality is more nuanced. If parents restrict access to information and the state doesn't intervene, the harm is bigger.

To what degree should the state be able to intervene if parents are preventing their children from access to the truth? Should homeschooling be allowed? Should children be taken from their parents? Should parents who don’t agree with certain content be compelled to fund distribution of that content via public libraries?

In other words, good things are good and bad things are bad.

It's astonishing how many people (or bots) in 2025 talk as if the only allowed positions are "the state is good" or "the state is bad" and "parents are good" or "parents are bad", like they have no ability to recognize when individual separate actions are good or bad.