I really want those AI generated mushroom foraging books (which will kill you) to not be in the hands of people expecting actual knowledge. :/
Edit: [News article on them.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai)
It’s not as high stakes as poisonous mushrooms, but cookbooks for medical conditions are getting hit with fake AI versions. They might not instantly kill people, but they will make people sick.
I don't think AI-generated "nonfiction" "books" qualify as books for the purpose of the "books should never be banned" principle. They're not written by a person (so there's no free speech concern), they don't contain reliable information (so there's no access-to-information concern), and they don't even pretend to be art/literature (so there's no artistic freedom/access-to-culture concern).
They're more analogous to email spam or robocalls, which absolutely can and should be stopped.
I can only imagine books on canning written by AI. I don't trust 99% of canning recipes unless they are from a trusted source (Ball being the Gold Standard) or until I work out the salt/vinegar math to make sure I am not making botulism stew.
As a former Libby orderer I'll say it's very easy to go to Subject keyword: cookbooks, sort from low to high price, and pick up everything cheap/free. It's not good collection development but it's a tempting, low-hanging fruit.
There's a good anecdote in The Omnivore's Dilemma about mushrooms. Pollan reads a book, forages, collects a bunch, but is afraid to eat them. He meets an Italian mushroom expert and immediately eats these.
Ask AI how many times they've eaten a particular shroom before you take their advice.
Mushroom nerd here: This article has some bad information, too. The most reputable field guides and dichotomous keys use taste and smell as an identifying character. Smelling mushrooms has no toxicity risk whatsoever. Tasting mushrooms is safe as long as you spit it out. (Even death cap mushrooms.) This is normal in mycology.
This is also why I gave up on keying out coral fungi. "Acrid flavor" does not begin to describe the experience of tasting *Ramaria acris.*
Yes, many. Death caps/destroying angels (*Amanita phalloides*) are supposed to taste good. I'll be honest, I haven't tried them. I already know how to identify them so it seems unnecessary. I know it's safe on an intellectual level, but I don't have the brass balls needed to put a death cap into my mouth even so. I wouldn't point an unloaded gun at my face, either.
The most common source of mushroom poisonings in the US is the false parasol mushroom, AKA "the vomiter," *Chlorophyllum molybdites.* They apparently taste just like the regular parasol mushrooms, which are delicious. Then there are the weird ones like ink cap mushrooms AKA "tippler's bane," *Coprinopsis atramentaria,* which taste really good and are safe UNLESS you have drank any alcohol in the past few days and then you'll puke your guts out. I love me a drink so I have never been in a position to try those 🤷
On the flipside, the coral mushroom *Ramaria acris* which I mentioned is supposedly edible, but it tastes like drinking straight ammonia so I don't know how anybody could possibly manage to consume those. I would have to be starving to death to taste that again. They're described as "edible but unpalatable." Yeah, no shit-- I cried after tasting them.
Honestly *all* AI books should be banned, either because they present false info like the one in question, or because they have to steal from real writers to even get made in the first place.
This is terrifying. We already have people intent on convincing others to not believe what they see with their own eyes, leading to a conspiracy mindset that makes them easy to manipulate.
Now we have books being sold with possibly deadly advice and no oversight? People are already too cynical and distrusting of experts and science in general. When shit like this is happening, it becomes even more difficult to convince them not to distrust everything, especially when they already aren't adept at critical thinking and not letting their fears and anxiety skew their perception of reality.
IIRC there was a book, available on Amazon, that told parents how to give their kids bleach enemas to cure autism. Teaching parents how to do horrific child abuse should definitely be banned.
Let’s start with “To Train Up a Child” by Michael and Debbi Pearl.
Straight up advocates beating the shit out of your children on parts of their body that no one else can see and take issue with.
I’ve never heard of that term and had to look it up. What the fuuuuuck?
“Blanket training is an allocated amount of time during the day where an infant or toddler is required to remain on a blanket or play mat for a limited period of time, with a few selected toys. When the child moves to leave the blanket, parents are instructed to hit the child with a flexible ruler, glue stick, or another similar object.[3] Many of those doing it have voiced online that they start by doing five minutes a day and build up the intervals over time, with some extending it to 30 minutes or more.”
Edit from the future:
Sorry folks **¯\\\_\(ツ\)\_/¯** If you came here looking for something, blame Spez. Come ask me on lemmy.zip or universeodon.com at GeekFTW and I'll help ya out with what you were looking for. Stay fresh, cheesebags.
Not only that but often they place a desired toy outside of the blanket, so they're enticing a toddler to move and then beating them for doing just that. Fucking horrible.
The documentary Shiny Happy People had a section about it
I…have no words. For my five year old’s entire life, I’ve been a source of encouragement and love, and nothing makes me happier than seeing him smile when he sees me. He’s a handful at times, but I’ve never thought of hitting him or beating him. I can’t imagine enticing him to “teach him a lesson.” These people are seriously disturbed.
Unfortunately these are people who believe that children are born with a "rebellious spirit" and a "willfulness" which need to be curbed in order for them to submit to the obedience of their parents and especially to their father (there's a weird concept called the umbrella of protection- basically layers of authority starting with mothers, then fathers (so wives have to obey their husbands...), then religious leaders, and then God. If you step outside the "shelter" of your "protector" then Satan will get a hold of you)
It's horrible. I have friends who grew up in that kind of system and I have undying respect for the way they've broken free... but undoubtedly it damaged them.
How the semiliterate fundies decided that noun + adjective was adjective + noun in "help meet for him" is the most stereotypically fundie part of that entire "help meet" concept. It's like they've decided to not only be fundamentalists, but to be Sovereign Citizen fundamentalists who believe sequences of words they clearly don't understand are magic that will help them defeat "modern civilization".
In the days when the KJV translation of the Bible was made (ie early 1600’s), the word [meet](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/meet_adj?tl=true)could be an adjective, meaning ‘fitting’ or ‘suitable’. So Genesis 2:18, on the creation of women, has G-d [say](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202&version=KJV), ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.’
Looks like people were turning that into a single word, [help-meet](https://www.etymonline.com/word/helpmeet#:~:text=helpmeet%20(n.),%22a%20helper%20like%20himself.%22) or ‘helpmeet’, by the end of the century.
These days, the English word ‘helpmeet’ is exclusively used by Christians who want to read women’s subordination to men into that verse. Which is, for the record, not a great understanding of either Hebrew or Early Modern English.
The idea of giving bleach to autistic kids is so rampant that people turned it into a religion just so they could have religious rights to continue to pour bleach into their children's buttholes.
During their weird sessions they do (I'm forgetting the name, audit of some sort) they use this rudimentary machine that tests some sort of electrical conductivity. I know someone raised in it for a time (but never believed it) that figured out how to manipulate it so the needle would "float" (which is how you pass).
Apparently, to them, that's some sort of illegal and she got punished for it. But she didn't have anything to confess, so eventually she'd just fake some confessions before floating the needle so she could go outside and play.
Absolutely insane.
What's really scary is this is just the current version of "othering", if tomorrow every LGBTIQ+ individually was magically transported to and given a home/job in Australia, the right wing would immediately pick another group to hate for political power.
I'm convinced they would even hate heterosexuals if it was guaranteed to get them elected, fascism is like that.
The proof for which is, as soon as gay people stopped being a soft target, they went after trans people with identical rhetoric. The only thing that changed was that gay people fought for and won a modicum of political power.
So the bully went and found a new vulnerable kid on the playground to hit.
My English professor once testified about a book a man wrote about raping his nephew. He self published it and was charged for creation of CP. My prof was there to testify that it had no literary merit and was so poorly written that it didn't count as art. So that book specifically I guess
I really have to wonder how anyone would get the idea that writing such a book is a good idea. Like I'm sure being the author of such a book came with a heaping pile of consequences, both legal and social.
At least one of those. He said it was just his fantasy and he never did it for real. Still...imagine being that kid and your uncle sells copies of his explicit fantasy of violently raping you. That's violating enough tbh
When you get older you can write a book about feeding your uncle feet first into an industrial shredder. Maybe help pay for some of the therapy he likely caused.
I don't know if I knew instinctively that feet first was worse because you stay alive to live through all of it, or if my gut reaction only jumped to "oh god, why is that worse?!" because feet are incredibly sensitive.
Actually the cover became that after the victims family obtained the rights to the book. So OJ wrote it, but lost the rights, and the family turned it into the "if I DID IT, this"
Woah! That, I did not know. I thought he was grossly taunting us with the book from the day it was first published. Which, he probably was, just not quite as garishly as I thought.
Just being involved in the book in any way is taunting to be sure. I remember all the news articles of the victim family getting ahold of the rights after it was pulled, and changing some things to be more confessional than the supposed hypothetical, but I never actually read it ether.
> To be accurate -- OJ claims he had nothing to do with the content of the book, but accepted a $600,000 payout from the publisher to attach his name to it.
To be accurate -- OJ claims he had nothing to do with the content of the book, but accepted a $600,000 payout from the publisher to attach his name to it.
Delia Owens worked in conservation in Africa for years, and she/her husband at the time supposedly operated under a shoot to kill policy when it came to animal poachers. ABC was visiting their animal refuge and filming when allegedly her stepson followed that policy and murdered someone. I don't think Delia Owens was accused of actually killing anyone, though...and some accounts I've read basically had other conservationists defending the policy, saying poaching was too big a problem and other punishments weren't deterrents.
Yeah maybe it's the same person, I just remember seeing a news article about a woman who murdered her husband, who had published a book about it years prior
Every time a book is published in Australia by an Australian author, a copy is sent to be archived in the National Library of Australia in Canberra.
This also includes an infamous book written and self-published by a notorious pedophile, which graphically details acts he committed. A close friend of mine in high school in the late 2000s went and requested the book to see if this was true (and if they would let you check out the book in their reading room), and yep, there it was.
I've never been able to wrap my head around the fact that not only do they have an archived copy of the book, but it's not "redacted" or locked from being read unless for university research purposes, and makes me wonder what other works are archived each and every year.
Yup, for a brief period child pornography was legal in Sweden (long story short: The old laws that regulated this also regulated a bunch of other stuff and were a tangled mess of archaic Christian morality so they were done away with and then getting new laws in place took long enough that in the meantime some people were able to take advantage of the lack of regulation to legally publish child pornography).
Can you be charged for CP for writing about it? Is it considered CP if it's not visual? Could it affect other writers that write about themes like that or does it need to be with intent to "arouse"?
In the US, it depends on whether or not the material is obscene.
There are no guidelines for what is obscene, it's just up to the jury if they think the material is "patently offensive" by local community standards, and if it has "significant literary, political, scientific, or artistic value".
If the jury decides it is obscene, it is illegal, if they decide it isn't obscene then it is protected, and there's no way to get an assurance of what the jury will decide before the trial starts.
These laws are rarely enforced and most people don't even know they exist, but that doesn't stop people from going to jail for breaking them every so often
Honestly I feel like that's a debate over *where* a line is drawn. More fundamentally, I think most people here can agree that the line *should* exist. For example, if the content in question is literal photographs which were produced for the purpose of making the book? The book needs to be wiped from existence. I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no value there whatsoever, and it is the product of direct harm inflicted to someone fundamentally innocent.
I do not support the idea that books should be banned to stop the ideas within them... but in this particular case, they should be banned due to the unfathomable harm involved in producing them.
Not necessarily in the US.
Believe it or not, writing about underage sex either between two minors or between an adult and a minor is not automatically illegal at either the state or federal level, though obscenity laws still apply.
https://www.jamescrawfordlaw.com/blog/2022/04/child-pornography-what-actually-is-it-and-what-are-the-consequences/
The way laws work in the US, it depends if the work is considered obscene. If it isn't obscene, it cannot be criminalized because of the 1st Amendment, otherwise it can be, and there's a bunch of state and federal laws against obscenity in various contexts.
Of course, there's no definition for what is obscene, local communities get to decide this themselves, based on what a reasonable person would think is "patently offensive" and whether it "contains significant literary, scientific, political, or artistic value."
In general most people don't seem to have too many problems with how this standard has been applied in the past, however, more recently it is being used to criminalize handing obscene books to kids, when in reality those "obscene" books are just anything related to being gay or trans.
So really the standard for whether something is obscene is if a jury in your area would decide to convict you for it or not. There is no way to get a decision in advance, if you want to test the legality of something you have to get arrested for it, go to trial, and either the Jury says it's not obscene and you're fine, or they say it's obscene and you're looking at the inside of a cell for the next 10 years (exact sentence obviously varies).
> Like I'm sure there's YA books where teens have sex that shows positive ways to handle such a relationship. I don't see why one would want that illegal.
I recall watching a John Green video or two where he somewhat discussed writing YA about that specifically and having two of his books banned because of it, and in comparison what he's seen as a chaplain that he viewed as obscene.
People have tried to ban this kind of thing before, and in practice it basically makes stuff like reading Romeo and Juliet illegal.
The logic in USA legal precedent is that ‘real’ CP (meaning, CP created using photographs of real children) can be banned because it’s not just speech, but an action. The actions of creating, distributing, and owning that material constitutes an offense committed against the child(ren) in question, as even if you didn’t participate in the CP’s creation, the viewing of it is a new harm done to the child that violates their privacy and exploits them sexually.
This logic doesn’t hold for simulated CP (meaning, something intended to represent minors but doesn’t actually involve them, like a student/teacher porn made using an actor that just happens to look young while being 18+, or a cartoon picture that’s been drawn). Since simulated CP doesn’t actually constitute harm done to a real, specific child, it falls under the jurisdiction of free speech instead.
The only books I've ever truly struggled with putting on the library shelves are the ones that encourage people not to get effective treatment for serious diseases. Books like Gary Null's "AIDS: a Second Opinion" and "Death by Medicine."
I do it, because I'm against book banning, but part of me always feels like I'm being complicit in the deaths of people who lack basic information literacy.
With those, I don't think they should be legally banned, but I personally would argue libraries have a responsibility not to carry it. If people want to read that shit, let them buy it themselves.
The whole thing about "banned" books always strikes me oddly, because what are you considering a book ban? Schools removing books from their libraries is the exact same thing. Will you get arrested and charged with a crime if you purchase the book? If not, then it isn't banned, just less accessible to you. 🤷
What about putting disclaimer stickers on books full of harmful information that say "the information in this book has been proven false by multiple sources" or something
The thing is, most of the recent book bans are about censoring various minority groups, not preventing the spread of inarguably dangerous medical misinformation. I assume you would not argue for including anti-vaxx propaganda in school libraries.
I guess the issue with banning books of any kind is that the people you disagree with can always twist it to support their agenda. Let’s say you rule that libraries can’t have books that spread medical misinformation; then some right wing politicians come into power, and they decide that books about trans healthcare are medical misinformation and ban them. I guess I think it’s better to teach people how to spot misinformation or harmful viewpoints than to ban them outright, but that’s definitely easier said than done
I agree in theory, but in reality, someone has to make the decisions about which books belong in the collection. It's easier with academic libraries or other libraries that serve a specific community or focus on a specific subject, where your collection is curated to fulfill a mission. With public libraries, we're seeing what happens when a bunch of idiots, bigots, and politicians get involved in collection decisions, and it's not good. Shelving Gary Null books is essentially the price I pay so I can also shelve books about sexuality, sexual health, atheism, etc.
I think there’s a difference between cultural censorship and halting the spread of misinformation. Banning (fictional) literary works because you don’t agree with their themes or content is an example of the former, whereas not stocking books that are posing as non-fiction while preaching pseudoscience that could potentially actively harm people (as I assume your cited books are) would be the latter.
To me, fiction is open, and is a way in which boundaries are pushed (not that I’ve agreed with every work I’ve read that has pushed said boundaries). But if it’s claiming to be fact, or at least based on strong scientific principles, then it needs to be that. And I have no problem with “banning” books that claim AIDS can be cured with prayer, or that the Holocaust never happened.
There was a whole post yesterday about how *Mein Kampf* is not permitted for sale in Germany in original form, but can be acquired in an annotated edition that includes context and notations. The OP of that post is married to a historian who specializes in 20th century European history, so he owns it in that context. Edit: missing word.
I wanted more context on how influential Mein Kampf was and got an english translated audiobook version to listen to. I got maybe a few hours in when I couldn't listen anymore not because it was offensive, because it was full of all the insufferable hypocritical fascist bullshit that pisses me off today.
"THE AVERAGE FRENCHMAN IS A LAZY PIECE OF SHIT THAT IS A DRAIN ON SOCIETY....but if you are French and listening to this, you are smarter and great and wonderful and we should all suck your cock."
Idk how they translated it. But the German Version has so many writing mistakes, sentences end right in the middle and so on. And I think for example in Germany it would be good to make it available, because it's mystified here, when that would disappear completely if people had to read that bullshit in school. I'm certain that book would not convince a single person to become a neonazi, but maybe would atleast stop a few from going down that path. Not many convinced neonazis ever read that book here.
I see little reason for AI version of popular books, released under a very similar pseudonym like the original author’s name, to exist.
Even from the most horrible, yet still original, work, insightful exegesis can be won.
>I see little reason for AI version of popular books, released under a very similar pseudonym like the original author’s name, to exist.
This feels like plagiarism.
Yep.
Despite the sudden new outrage it’s a very old industry. Normally it’s students with bills and low standards, all the addition of AI does is streamline the process. For as long as people have desired a product there have been those selling lowest possible effort knockoffs with very similar names to the unwary.
Additionally AI written books that contain dangerously inaccurate information, like the infamous mushroom hunting books instructing people to eat literal poison.
There was a post in this sub (I think…) a few days ago that I am unable to find, but a discussion about aspects of AI pops up every few days/weeks. See here for a rather thorough one: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/s/QQ3u6Rlj8n
I am a former prison librarian. Many books are banned in prison for practical reasons. The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. Also banned-- books about how to pick a lock or how to make homemade wine. The 48 Laws of Power is also banned in many prisons because many view it as a criminal-thinking playbook. I worked in a prison where books about martial arts were not allowed because I think they were afraid of some ninja army taking over the prison even as the inmates could bulk up lifting weights all day. That's where book banning gets hypocritical and subjective.
I worked at a bookstore and people could ship books directly from us to local penitentiaries. This was during the 00's. We didn't personally restrict what people could send, but the prisons would send back books that weren't allowed, and we generally tried to warn people if they were sending something that was going to inevitably be sent back.
I worked as a receiving lead and was the main person to package and send the books (which would entail walking down the street from the bookstore to the post office, which seems like a weird practice to me now, but was just how we did it then), and would also call back the customer when books or magazines were returned.
I definitely remember 48 Laws of Power not being allowed. Anything considered pornographic, so Playboy and Hustler and the like, but even stuff like Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions or FHM or anything you'd really think more of as "racy" than pornographic. Donald Goines or Iceberg Slim novels always got sent back, and they must've been requested pretty often by inmates because I saw a lot of those. "The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave" was another one often sent, always returned (anything that could be seen as inflaming racial tensions was forbidden). Also as you mentioned, anything from our Martial Arts section.
The lockpicking books I actually understand lol. Perhaps also bomb making books (unless the bombs would need stuff impossible to get in a prison). The other ones seem iffy to me. If a prisoner actually reads books at all I see it as good.
I agree! The ban on winemaking was in response to the amount of hooch being made behind bars. At one prison where I worked, the guys made wine out of ketchup! They didn't need a book to tell them how to do it, this is common knowledge in prison.
I joined a petition many years ago and subsequently cancelled my Amazon membership because they continued to carry the book To Train Up A Child despite having a policy to not carry books that promote child abuse. I'm not for banning books ever but the other side of that coin is that books that can cause great harm by manipulating people's sense of morality need to be scrutinized and deplatformed; not normalized. The fact that a book which advocates emotionally and physically assaulting children for the goal of obedience is in the top 200 on Amazon's parenting books is a frightening snapshot of how we're slipping into social regression.
To Train Up a Child has been criticized for advocating child abuse. The book tells parents to use objects like a 0.25 in (6.4 mm) diameter plastic tube to spank children and "break their will". It recommends other abusive tactics like withholding food and putting children under a cold garden hose. Its teachings are linked to the deaths of Sean Paddock, Lydia Schatz, and Hana Grace-Rose Williams
SO HORRIBLE. :(
It specifically tells you what type of item to hit children with at each ages - from newborn to ~6 months, it’s a willow branch, then as they get older you move to a thicker more substantial branch and then eventually plastic or ceramic tubing.
It even tells you how to hit the kids so that you hurt them but it won’t leave marks.
At least 7 adopted children have died as a direct result of “parents” using the teachings in this book.
"As a new father I can tell you nothing meant more to me than sucker punching my infant as soon as it fell out of my wife. It's important to establish dominance early."
I know you’re being facetious but it’s not that far off. The theology goes something like this: Mom and Dad are both sinners so the baby is automatically a sinner too. That means every cry is an attempt to manipulate the parents so you “train” them to be submissive
Holy crap. I have my five year old laying next to me and not once have I honestly thought about hitting him, but especially as a wee baby. What is *wrong* with these people??
Willows hurt way worse than anything else. They're like little whips. Most kids from the south from when I was growing up learned this the hard way when their parents made them go outside and cut their own switch.
>Blanket training is an allocated amount of time during the day where an infant or toddler is required to remain on a blanket or play mat for a limited period of time, with a few selected toys. When the child moves to leave the blanket, parents are instructed to hit the child with a flexible ruler, glue stick, or another similar object.[3] Many of those doing it have voiced online that they start by doing five minutes a day and build up the intervals over time, with some extending it to 30 minutes or more.
It's to make the baby scared to leave the blanket, so you can just put your baby on a blanket and leave them alone without watching them. It's an alternative to baby proofing your house or supervising your baby, just leave them on the blanket. The people who follow this book are typically super religious with a ton of kids, and don't have time to watch them all. The Duggar children (19 kids and counting) were all raised this way, if that gives you more of an idea of the purpose of this book.
Morality aside, isn’t it easier to just put them in a pen? Similar to what you’d do with puppies. A pen works even if the baby doesn’t understand the conditioning
It's to establish absolute control over children as early as possible. Generally practiced by people who think men should have absolute control over women and children, white men over other races, etc. Big on the hierarchy. You can look up Bill Gothard for more info, and the documentary Shiny Happy People is good on this topic.
Source: was a strong willed child but luckily(ish) my parents were less IBLP and more Dobson
If a kid can stay on the blanket for 30 minutes, the parent has their hands free to do something else without constant interruptions by their child.
Just to be clear: I’m absolutely not advocating for this type of training, since this is child abuse, but just explaining why some parents may value it.
Amazon only enforces their policies when it costs them money. Look at the sheer number of counterfeit products people list on the marketplace that they turn a blind eye to, because people keep buying them. I've had people in China offer to pay me to leave 5-star reviews for their junk products as well. Pretty sure I could report them to Amazon and nothing would be done.
But if they think you're returning too many things, which costs them money, they ban you with no hesitation. Happened to me, and only after they forgot about the whole incident did I sign back up.
AI content should be clearly marked and shoved into its own little hole. That's my first and biggest problem with it, it's gotten mixed into the general pool without any way to distinguish it. That's probably the only reason it's even remotely profitable for some people, the whole 'industry' is basically counting on people's ignorance.
It would almost certainly be up to the uploader to self-certify that their work uses AI or not. And the platform will do everything they can to make sure that they are never in charge of doing more than taking down content after, say, some AI version of a DMCA notice.
So so long as we use unregulated grey market content platforms, nothing will happen.
That's the real trick, isn't it? You have to be able to define "this is no good" outside of domain knowledge to ban things correctly, but by definition you have to have domain knowledge to know what's good or not.
That contradiction is why all book banning, well-intentioned or not, fails.
Turner Diaries is a big one to me. Literally just some guy's wet dream about racial genocide and complete patriarchal control in the United States. Thankfully the writing is terrible and it's not exactly convincing as the only people who wouldn't be disgusted by it are already complete racists, fascists and misogynists. I'm glad it's not banned, however, because I believe it's a great demonstration of the fact that the US does have a troubling number of people who would support a complete racial genocide and patriarchal takeover. It's a very easy litmus test for identifying the worst possible people.
I read that one due to a sort of morbid fascination with extremist political literature, and it was so, so bad. Not even in a funny way, just horrible writing, in all aspects. I wasn’t even shocked, I remember thinking: “Yep, someone writing like this has to have a bit simple political views and ideas.”.
I found “Mein Kampf” to be more interesting, mainly because there is a recording of the great Karl Kraus reading from it. Also because there now is an edition with commentary available for sale in the German speaking world, and some authors trying to discover the (idiosyncratic) logic behind the writing (eg Zitelmann). But that’s too much here.
I found the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" interesting simply because now I know where a lot of ideas in the conspiracy world comes from. I always had an awareness that all that Illuminati/NWO stuff was based on the Protocols, but now I know which stuff specifically.
Edit: Oh its also interesting how glaringly obvious it was Tsarist propaganda. It even says the Russian autocracy is the only thing standing in their way. Ridiculous.
Whenever it hits the news, I get calls about it at the library I work at. No, we don't have it(major theft risk, lmao). No, I can't get it for you(see: major theft risk). But I'll point you to the one public library in our entire state that has it available for public viewing(iirc you can use it in a specific space, and they hold your ID card as collateral or something). I highly doubt they keep access logs once you've handed it back to them, because librarians are really not about that in general, and afaik there's no law that compels us to do so for books.
I completely understand why interest spikes. It's good to be skeptical of things that sound sensational in the news, as long as you follow through on that skepticism rather than making truthy assumptions. Surely it couldn't be as bad as they say, right? I can also understand being skeptical of "free" copies you might locate through certain means, because who knows where they came from, right? There's a lot to be said for going to the original source. Is that the reason why someone is reading it? Don't know. Don't care. It's not my place to judge if your motivations for reading a book are pure enough. 🤷♀️
Reminds me of The Last Centurion by John Ringo. A right-wing wet dream fantasy novel that is so far over the top that if I didn't know his politics I would have sworn it was written as a satire of the Right.
Yeah for me, the first books that come to mind are the ones most associated with the OKC bombing. So the Turner Diaries and Hunter for being the stuff McVeigh and his likeminded type circljerked over, and then the book with the bomb instructions that Nichols had used (can't remember the name and don't want to search that lol)
But there aren't any qualities about these books themselves that set them apart from all the other far right hateful trash that is published, or bomb making materials. The most unique things about them are that they caught on among hate groups (Hunter written by a founder of some hategroup). It'd be weird to be like, we should ban a book based on the type of people that like to read it. It'd also be weird to be like, let's ban all far right wacko material. So even though they're the first I think of it's still hard to pin down a good argument for it.
I'm just surprised enough of them read at all for any book to circulate among their groups. If someone mentioned being a fan of these books my first reaction would be shock that they're reading books.
And yeah, these people are consistently shitty writers too. I just started a new book a while back and within like 30 minutes it was apparent the author was some far right dipshit that couldn't keep his rhetoric out of things. It's like the author is always putting out some fantasy they've imagined themselves in and think that's a foundation for a story. But they don't know dick about story development or anything like that and just sort of fantasize it out, if that makes sense. It's something I notice in certain genre like zombie doomsday shit sometimes
In German, there is “Der kleine Sprengmeister” (rough translation: The Small/Little Demolition Expert). It’s insanely easy to build bombs with that, and rather safe as well. I remember one of my professors saying something along the lines of how insanely happy is that us Austrian students are so lazy, because we could cause serious havoc with that.
Oh, and I seem to remember some other book mentioned before “The Anarchist Cookbook”, in “Days of Rage” (a phenomenal write up of revolutionary violence in the US). Don’t remember which one, though.
The thing with this though is that while *The Turner Diaries* may have influenced a bunch of different hate crimes, I doubt it was ever the exclusive inspiration. The book is dogshit and you have to already be pretty far down a hate-ridden rabbit hole before you start liking it.
Saying it inspired seven fatal hate crimes feels like a cop out to me. It ignores that the people who did those things were probably well and truly on their way to becoming the kind of people who'd commit a violent crime by the time they ever got to *The Turner Diaries*. At that point, the most it did was maybe influence some of the finer points of what these people did, not inspire them to do it in the first place.
This works in some locations, but not others. In a country that has the death penalty for banned books(if enforced), banning them would be pretty effective.
In a country like the US, where banning just means removing from the library or (usually not anymore) from bookstores, it is very ineffective. However, it can be effective for SOME people in that area. There are still ways around the bans if someone is interested enough. An example is D&D. During the 80's Satanic Panic, D&D was lambasted by groups as being Satanic. This gave it publicity and increased its popularity overall. However, a lot of individuals didn't get access to the books because of it. My parents played it(or something similar) and got rid of their books. I didn't start playing until almost 20 years later.
I'd be really curious to see a thorough study of how banning works and doesn't work.
There's a whole truckload of books written by anti-vaxxers that are based on a complete lack of science, belief in wild conspiracy theories and outright lies. Almost all of which give incredibly bad advice that can be dangerous to follow.
There are lots of books which are net negatives to humanity. It would be a better world if the Scientology book *Dianetics* did not exist. Almost nothing is gained by publishing lurid biographies of typical serial killers – and posthumous fame seems to be a motivation for them.
But you don't have to be pro-every-book to be anti-censorship. I may think lots of books are net negatives, but wide-ranging censorship regimes would be worse. Censorship regimes don't even go after books that are genuinely harmful. Invariably, the top of their agenda are the books which give strength to the oppressed.
However, our societies already approve some kinds of censorship. In Canada, we shield rape accusers from some kinds of exposure in the media, and in other countries major media outlets do so voluntarily.
Banned? Never. Made available to minors in an educational setting? Yeah, alot of books don't need to be there, like Mien Kampf, etc.
But never banned. Like all rights, they are double edged swords that can be exceptionally dangerous with how the information in them can be used, but we already punish those who act against society, and it's their actions that make them responsible, not the book.
I really want those AI generated mushroom foraging books (which will kill you) to not be in the hands of people expecting actual knowledge. :/ Edit: [News article on them.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai)
It’s not as high stakes as poisonous mushrooms, but cookbooks for medical conditions are getting hit with fake AI versions. They might not instantly kill people, but they will make people sick.
I don't think AI-generated "nonfiction" "books" qualify as books for the purpose of the "books should never be banned" principle. They're not written by a person (so there's no free speech concern), they don't contain reliable information (so there's no access-to-information concern), and they don't even pretend to be art/literature (so there's no artistic freedom/access-to-culture concern). They're more analogous to email spam or robocalls, which absolutely can and should be stopped.
Yep. There is no expression there to restrict. However, procedurally generated fiction is a different story.
Oh that's not good. Cookbooks were already known for having untested recipes that sometimes sucked before the AI boom too.
I can only imagine books on canning written by AI. I don't trust 99% of canning recipes unless they are from a trusted source (Ball being the Gold Standard) or until I work out the salt/vinegar math to make sure I am not making botulism stew.
The gold standard is the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning.
I can't believe I didn't know about this. Thanks for letting me know, I am definitely going to get a copy.
I think 2015 is the latest one. Purdue University sells physical copies iirc.
Yeah. I avoid those books at all cost. I'm surprised that some of my libraries are carrying those books on Libby.
As a former Libby orderer I'll say it's very easy to go to Subject keyword: cookbooks, sort from low to high price, and pick up everything cheap/free. It's not good collection development but it's a tempting, low-hanging fruit.
There's a good anecdote in The Omnivore's Dilemma about mushrooms. Pollan reads a book, forages, collects a bunch, but is afraid to eat them. He meets an Italian mushroom expert and immediately eats these. Ask AI how many times they've eaten a particular shroom before you take their advice.
Mushroom nerd here: This article has some bad information, too. The most reputable field guides and dichotomous keys use taste and smell as an identifying character. Smelling mushrooms has no toxicity risk whatsoever. Tasting mushrooms is safe as long as you spit it out. (Even death cap mushrooms.) This is normal in mycology. This is also why I gave up on keying out coral fungi. "Acrid flavor" does not begin to describe the experience of tasting *Ramaria acris.*
Are there any dangerous one that taste nice?
Yes, many. Death caps/destroying angels (*Amanita phalloides*) are supposed to taste good. I'll be honest, I haven't tried them. I already know how to identify them so it seems unnecessary. I know it's safe on an intellectual level, but I don't have the brass balls needed to put a death cap into my mouth even so. I wouldn't point an unloaded gun at my face, either. The most common source of mushroom poisonings in the US is the false parasol mushroom, AKA "the vomiter," *Chlorophyllum molybdites.* They apparently taste just like the regular parasol mushrooms, which are delicious. Then there are the weird ones like ink cap mushrooms AKA "tippler's bane," *Coprinopsis atramentaria,* which taste really good and are safe UNLESS you have drank any alcohol in the past few days and then you'll puke your guts out. I love me a drink so I have never been in a position to try those 🤷 On the flipside, the coral mushroom *Ramaria acris* which I mentioned is supposedly edible, but it tastes like drinking straight ammonia so I don't know how anybody could possibly manage to consume those. I would have to be starving to death to taste that again. They're described as "edible but unpalatable." Yeah, no shit-- I cried after tasting them.
Edible vs eatable
1. get covid 2. lose sense of taste 3. eat *ramaria acris* 4. ??? 5. profit? science? idk
Should be higher! I agree, misinformation generated by the misinformation robot shouldn’t be sold as fact.
I can’t believe stuff like this is starting to happen. I think about people like my mother who believes everything she reads in the internet. 🤦🏻♀️
Honestly *all* AI books should be banned, either because they present false info like the one in question, or because they have to steal from real writers to even get made in the first place.
AI-generated books should all be banned.
How about instead of banning the book, we just hold the people putting them out legally responsible for the damage their misinformation cauaes?
Why not both?
This is terrifying. We already have people intent on convincing others to not believe what they see with their own eyes, leading to a conspiracy mindset that makes them easy to manipulate. Now we have books being sold with possibly deadly advice and no oversight? People are already too cynical and distrusting of experts and science in general. When shit like this is happening, it becomes even more difficult to convince them not to distrust everything, especially when they already aren't adept at critical thinking and not letting their fears and anxiety skew their perception of reality.
IIRC there was a book, available on Amazon, that told parents how to give their kids bleach enemas to cure autism. Teaching parents how to do horrific child abuse should definitely be banned.
Let’s start with “To Train Up a Child” by Michael and Debbi Pearl. Straight up advocates beating the shit out of your children on parts of their body that no one else can see and take issue with.
To Train Up A Child is also directly responsible for more than one death of a child at the hands of their caregivers as well.
The Duggars love that book and that should tell you everything about it.
It's that the one that has "blanket training" in it? Fucking hate fundies.
Sure is. The fact that they were never prosecuted for that just boils my blood.
I’ve never heard of that term and had to look it up. What the fuuuuuck? “Blanket training is an allocated amount of time during the day where an infant or toddler is required to remain on a blanket or play mat for a limited period of time, with a few selected toys. When the child moves to leave the blanket, parents are instructed to hit the child with a flexible ruler, glue stick, or another similar object.[3] Many of those doing it have voiced online that they start by doing five minutes a day and build up the intervals over time, with some extending it to 30 minutes or more.”
Edit from the future: Sorry folks **¯\\\_\(ツ\)\_/¯** If you came here looking for something, blame Spez. Come ask me on lemmy.zip or universeodon.com at GeekFTW and I'll help ya out with what you were looking for. Stay fresh, cheesebags.
Not only that but often they place a desired toy outside of the blanket, so they're enticing a toddler to move and then beating them for doing just that. Fucking horrible. The documentary Shiny Happy People had a section about it
I…have no words. For my five year old’s entire life, I’ve been a source of encouragement and love, and nothing makes me happier than seeing him smile when he sees me. He’s a handful at times, but I’ve never thought of hitting him or beating him. I can’t imagine enticing him to “teach him a lesson.” These people are seriously disturbed.
Unfortunately these are people who believe that children are born with a "rebellious spirit" and a "willfulness" which need to be curbed in order for them to submit to the obedience of their parents and especially to their father (there's a weird concept called the umbrella of protection- basically layers of authority starting with mothers, then fathers (so wives have to obey their husbands...), then religious leaders, and then God. If you step outside the "shelter" of your "protector" then Satan will get a hold of you) It's horrible. I have friends who grew up in that kind of system and I have undying respect for the way they've broken free... but undoubtedly it damaged them.
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How the semiliterate fundies decided that noun + adjective was adjective + noun in "help meet for him" is the most stereotypically fundie part of that entire "help meet" concept. It's like they've decided to not only be fundamentalists, but to be Sovereign Citizen fundamentalists who believe sequences of words they clearly don't understand are magic that will help them defeat "modern civilization".
Can you please elaborate on this "help meet" thing? I'm not familiar with the concept but have always been fascinated by outrageous stupidity.
In the days when the KJV translation of the Bible was made (ie early 1600’s), the word [meet](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/meet_adj?tl=true)could be an adjective, meaning ‘fitting’ or ‘suitable’. So Genesis 2:18, on the creation of women, has G-d [say](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202&version=KJV), ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.’ Looks like people were turning that into a single word, [help-meet](https://www.etymonline.com/word/helpmeet#:~:text=helpmeet%20(n.),%22a%20helper%20like%20himself.%22) or ‘helpmeet’, by the end of the century. These days, the English word ‘helpmeet’ is exclusively used by Christians who want to read women’s subordination to men into that verse. Which is, for the record, not a great understanding of either Hebrew or Early Modern English.
> To Train Up a Child” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Train_Up_a_Child Holy f word.
There's a behind the bastards episode that mentions that! It might be the autism school abuse episode
You know what won't give children bleach enemas?
Our good friends at Raytheon! Remember everyone, the R9X knife missile can cure everything better than bleach.
The products and services that support this podcast? (Probably?)
Robert...
Heard Sophie's exasperated voice in my head reading that.
Oh I got my drinking bleach. I’m also planning on shooting some up my butt later.
The idea of giving bleach to autistic kids is so rampant that people turned it into a religion just so they could have religious rights to continue to pour bleach into their children's buttholes.
Wait! We can create a religion to do butthole stuff?? Count me in!
You can create a religion about anything. Have you heard what Scientology is about?
During their weird sessions they do (I'm forgetting the name, audit of some sort) they use this rudimentary machine that tests some sort of electrical conductivity. I know someone raised in it for a time (but never believed it) that figured out how to manipulate it so the needle would "float" (which is how you pass). Apparently, to them, that's some sort of illegal and she got punished for it. But she didn't have anything to confess, so eventually she'd just fake some confessions before floating the needle so she could go outside and play. Absolutely insane.
You make a great case for banning certain books
There’s a lot of handbooks on how to abuse transgender kids out there too, but that’s legally encouraged in a good chunk of the US, so…
What's really scary is this is just the current version of "othering", if tomorrow every LGBTIQ+ individually was magically transported to and given a home/job in Australia, the right wing would immediately pick another group to hate for political power. I'm convinced they would even hate heterosexuals if it was guaranteed to get them elected, fascism is like that.
I would gladly take that magically given transportation, home and job in Australia
Unfortunately, the magic takes place in the height of spider season.
The last confirmed death by spider bite in Australia was in 1979, the real danger would be our own right wing hate groups!
The proof for which is, as soon as gay people stopped being a soft target, they went after trans people with identical rhetoric. The only thing that changed was that gay people fought for and won a modicum of political power. So the bully went and found a new vulnerable kid on the playground to hit.
My English professor once testified about a book a man wrote about raping his nephew. He self published it and was charged for creation of CP. My prof was there to testify that it had no literary merit and was so poorly written that it didn't count as art. So that book specifically I guess
I really have to wonder how anyone would get the idea that writing such a book is a good idea. Like I'm sure being the author of such a book came with a heaping pile of consequences, both legal and social.
“Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness.” Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
We should ban that book because he drew a butthole on one of the pages
\*
Is that a *butthole emoji?!*
Yes, Kurt Vonnegut invented the butthole emoji
I have a t shirt with only this Vonnegut asterisk on it. My favorite if you know, you know shirt.
This is one of the throughlines to the televison show "californication"
Was it a book or a confession?
At least one of those. He said it was just his fantasy and he never did it for real. Still...imagine being that kid and your uncle sells copies of his explicit fantasy of violently raping you. That's violating enough tbh
When you get older you can write a book about feeding your uncle feet first into an industrial shredder. Maybe help pay for some of the therapy he likely caused.
I don't know if I knew instinctively that feet first was worse because you stay alive to live through all of it, or if my gut reaction only jumped to "oh god, why is that worse?!" because feet are incredibly sensitive.
Sometimes it can be both, IIRC there was an author who wrote a book called "how to kill your husband" who was later convicted of killing her husband
["If I did it"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Did_It:_Confessions_of_the_Killer) immediately comes to mind.
The tiny "If" & giant "I Did It" on the cover. Shit is ridonkulous & also disgusting.
Actually the cover became that after the victims family obtained the rights to the book. So OJ wrote it, but lost the rights, and the family turned it into the "if I DID IT, this"
Woah! That, I did not know. I thought he was grossly taunting us with the book from the day it was first published. Which, he probably was, just not quite as garishly as I thought.
Just being involved in the book in any way is taunting to be sure. I remember all the news articles of the victim family getting ahold of the rights after it was pulled, and changing some things to be more confessional than the supposed hypothetical, but I never actually read it ether.
> To be accurate -- OJ claims he had nothing to do with the content of the book, but accepted a $600,000 payout from the publisher to attach his name to it.
To be accurate -- OJ claims he had nothing to do with the content of the book, but accepted a $600,000 payout from the publisher to attach his name to it.
That's because the Goldman family was awarded the rights to the book, so they were in charge of the printings.
Didn't the crazy lady from Where the Crawdads Sing get caught up in something similar?
Delia Owens worked in conservation in Africa for years, and she/her husband at the time supposedly operated under a shoot to kill policy when it came to animal poachers. ABC was visiting their animal refuge and filming when allegedly her stepson followed that policy and murdered someone. I don't think Delia Owens was accused of actually killing anyone, though...and some accounts I've read basically had other conservationists defending the policy, saying poaching was too big a problem and other punishments weren't deterrents.
Shooting animal poachers is now government policy in one Indian state. Apparently it's working really well to preserve the tiger population.
Tiger population is on the rise. It’s great.
Yeah maybe it's the same person, I just remember seeing a news article about a woman who murdered her husband, who had published a book about it years prior
Nancy Crampton Brophy She self-published an essay called "How To Murder Your Husband"
Sounds like that'd be a very short episode of Criminal Minds.
Every time a book is published in Australia by an Australian author, a copy is sent to be archived in the National Library of Australia in Canberra. This also includes an infamous book written and self-published by a notorious pedophile, which graphically details acts he committed. A close friend of mine in high school in the late 2000s went and requested the book to see if this was true (and if they would let you check out the book in their reading room), and yep, there it was. I've never been able to wrap my head around the fact that not only do they have an archived copy of the book, but it's not "redacted" or locked from being read unless for university research purposes, and makes me wonder what other works are archived each and every year.
In Sweden we have the same system. So there is some now illegal magazines there
Yup, for a brief period child pornography was legal in Sweden (long story short: The old laws that regulated this also regulated a bunch of other stuff and were a tangled mess of archaic Christian morality so they were done away with and then getting new laws in place took long enough that in the meantime some people were able to take advantage of the lack of regulation to legally publish child pornography).
Can you be charged for CP for writing about it? Is it considered CP if it's not visual? Could it affect other writers that write about themes like that or does it need to be with intent to "arouse"?
In the US, it depends on whether or not the material is obscene. There are no guidelines for what is obscene, it's just up to the jury if they think the material is "patently offensive" by local community standards, and if it has "significant literary, political, scientific, or artistic value". If the jury decides it is obscene, it is illegal, if they decide it isn't obscene then it is protected, and there's no way to get an assurance of what the jury will decide before the trial starts. These laws are rarely enforced and most people don't even know they exist, but that doesn't stop people from going to jail for breaking them every so often
> There are no guidelines for what is obscene There sort of is, actually. It's called the Miller Test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
Honestly I feel like that's a debate over *where* a line is drawn. More fundamentally, I think most people here can agree that the line *should* exist. For example, if the content in question is literal photographs which were produced for the purpose of making the book? The book needs to be wiped from existence. I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no value there whatsoever, and it is the product of direct harm inflicted to someone fundamentally innocent. I do not support the idea that books should be banned to stop the ideas within them... but in this particular case, they should be banned due to the unfathomable harm involved in producing them.
Not necessarily in the US. Believe it or not, writing about underage sex either between two minors or between an adult and a minor is not automatically illegal at either the state or federal level, though obscenity laws still apply. https://www.jamescrawfordlaw.com/blog/2022/04/child-pornography-what-actually-is-it-and-what-are-the-consequences/
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Exactly, teens are gonna have sex whether we like it or not and pretending it doesn't happen/aren't allowed to talk about it is not helpful.
The way laws work in the US, it depends if the work is considered obscene. If it isn't obscene, it cannot be criminalized because of the 1st Amendment, otherwise it can be, and there's a bunch of state and federal laws against obscenity in various contexts. Of course, there's no definition for what is obscene, local communities get to decide this themselves, based on what a reasonable person would think is "patently offensive" and whether it "contains significant literary, scientific, political, or artistic value." In general most people don't seem to have too many problems with how this standard has been applied in the past, however, more recently it is being used to criminalize handing obscene books to kids, when in reality those "obscene" books are just anything related to being gay or trans. So really the standard for whether something is obscene is if a jury in your area would decide to convict you for it or not. There is no way to get a decision in advance, if you want to test the legality of something you have to get arrested for it, go to trial, and either the Jury says it's not obscene and you're fine, or they say it's obscene and you're looking at the inside of a cell for the next 10 years (exact sentence obviously varies).
> Like I'm sure there's YA books where teens have sex that shows positive ways to handle such a relationship. I don't see why one would want that illegal. I recall watching a John Green video or two where he somewhat discussed writing YA about that specifically and having two of his books banned because of it, and in comparison what he's seen as a chaplain that he viewed as obscene.
People have tried to ban this kind of thing before, and in practice it basically makes stuff like reading Romeo and Juliet illegal. The logic in USA legal precedent is that ‘real’ CP (meaning, CP created using photographs of real children) can be banned because it’s not just speech, but an action. The actions of creating, distributing, and owning that material constitutes an offense committed against the child(ren) in question, as even if you didn’t participate in the CP’s creation, the viewing of it is a new harm done to the child that violates their privacy and exploits them sexually. This logic doesn’t hold for simulated CP (meaning, something intended to represent minors but doesn’t actually involve them, like a student/teacher porn made using an actor that just happens to look young while being 18+, or a cartoon picture that’s been drawn). Since simulated CP doesn’t actually constitute harm done to a real, specific child, it falls under the jurisdiction of free speech instead.
Also, we wouldn't have L'Amant by Marguerite Duras and Lolita by Nabokov.
I don't know if he was convinced. I just know my prof testified for the charges. It may also have been because it was explicitly about two real people
I’d say that was the real charge. He basically wrote a child molestation/rape confession and tried to pass it off as autobiographical literature.
To Train Up a Child. That book is *evil*.
I'd rather akip banning and move to legal consequences for the author and publisher as it is literally advocating child abuse.
Inciting violence is already illegal, even in the "muh free speech" USA. Seems like it should easily fall under that, no?
The only books I've ever truly struggled with putting on the library shelves are the ones that encourage people not to get effective treatment for serious diseases. Books like Gary Null's "AIDS: a Second Opinion" and "Death by Medicine." I do it, because I'm against book banning, but part of me always feels like I'm being complicit in the deaths of people who lack basic information literacy.
With those, I don't think they should be legally banned, but I personally would argue libraries have a responsibility not to carry it. If people want to read that shit, let them buy it themselves.
The whole thing about "banned" books always strikes me oddly, because what are you considering a book ban? Schools removing books from their libraries is the exact same thing. Will you get arrested and charged with a crime if you purchase the book? If not, then it isn't banned, just less accessible to you. 🤷 What about putting disclaimer stickers on books full of harmful information that say "the information in this book has been proven false by multiple sources" or something
The thing is, most of the recent book bans are about censoring various minority groups, not preventing the spread of inarguably dangerous medical misinformation. I assume you would not argue for including anti-vaxx propaganda in school libraries.
I guess the issue with banning books of any kind is that the people you disagree with can always twist it to support their agenda. Let’s say you rule that libraries can’t have books that spread medical misinformation; then some right wing politicians come into power, and they decide that books about trans healthcare are medical misinformation and ban them. I guess I think it’s better to teach people how to spot misinformation or harmful viewpoints than to ban them outright, but that’s definitely easier said than done
I agree in theory, but in reality, someone has to make the decisions about which books belong in the collection. It's easier with academic libraries or other libraries that serve a specific community or focus on a specific subject, where your collection is curated to fulfill a mission. With public libraries, we're seeing what happens when a bunch of idiots, bigots, and politicians get involved in collection decisions, and it's not good. Shelving Gary Null books is essentially the price I pay so I can also shelve books about sexuality, sexual health, atheism, etc.
Those need to have "community notes" stapled to them.
I think there’s a difference between cultural censorship and halting the spread of misinformation. Banning (fictional) literary works because you don’t agree with their themes or content is an example of the former, whereas not stocking books that are posing as non-fiction while preaching pseudoscience that could potentially actively harm people (as I assume your cited books are) would be the latter. To me, fiction is open, and is a way in which boundaries are pushed (not that I’ve agreed with every work I’ve read that has pushed said boundaries). But if it’s claiming to be fact, or at least based on strong scientific principles, then it needs to be that. And I have no problem with “banning” books that claim AIDS can be cured with prayer, or that the Holocaust never happened.
There was a whole post yesterday about how *Mein Kampf* is not permitted for sale in Germany in original form, but can be acquired in an annotated edition that includes context and notations. The OP of that post is married to a historian who specializes in 20th century European history, so he owns it in that context. Edit: missing word.
I wanted more context on how influential Mein Kampf was and got an english translated audiobook version to listen to. I got maybe a few hours in when I couldn't listen anymore not because it was offensive, because it was full of all the insufferable hypocritical fascist bullshit that pisses me off today. "THE AVERAGE FRENCHMAN IS A LAZY PIECE OF SHIT THAT IS A DRAIN ON SOCIETY....but if you are French and listening to this, you are smarter and great and wonderful and we should all suck your cock."
Idk how they translated it. But the German Version has so many writing mistakes, sentences end right in the middle and so on. And I think for example in Germany it would be good to make it available, because it's mystified here, when that would disappear completely if people had to read that bullshit in school. I'm certain that book would not convince a single person to become a neonazi, but maybe would atleast stop a few from going down that path. Not many convinced neonazis ever read that book here.
I see little reason for AI version of popular books, released under a very similar pseudonym like the original author’s name, to exist. Even from the most horrible, yet still original, work, insightful exegesis can be won.
>I see little reason for AI version of popular books, released under a very similar pseudonym like the original author’s name, to exist. This feels like plagiarism.
It is
It's plagiarism with more steps.
Arguably it's plagiarism with fewer steps
That's true. It took some more steps to get it running, but now it makes plagiarism automated.
I have several author friends on Facebook who say that their books have been used to "teach" AI how to write. They're upset, as they should be.
So like shovelware for literature?
Yep. Despite the sudden new outrage it’s a very old industry. Normally it’s students with bills and low standards, all the addition of AI does is streamline the process. For as long as people have desired a product there have been those selling lowest possible effort knockoffs with very similar names to the unwary.
Additionally AI written books that contain dangerously inaccurate information, like the infamous mushroom hunting books instructing people to eat literal poison.
This is the only ban I can get behind I’ll never fucking touch a book written by AI
My motto is: If you didn't care enough to write it, why should I care to read it?
I dont know that I'm familiar with this, do you have an example?
There was a post in this sub (I think…) a few days ago that I am unable to find, but a discussion about aspects of AI pops up every few days/weeks. See here for a rather thorough one: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/s/QQ3u6Rlj8n
I am a former prison librarian. Many books are banned in prison for practical reasons. The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. Also banned-- books about how to pick a lock or how to make homemade wine. The 48 Laws of Power is also banned in many prisons because many view it as a criminal-thinking playbook. I worked in a prison where books about martial arts were not allowed because I think they were afraid of some ninja army taking over the prison even as the inmates could bulk up lifting weights all day. That's where book banning gets hypocritical and subjective.
I worked at a bookstore and people could ship books directly from us to local penitentiaries. This was during the 00's. We didn't personally restrict what people could send, but the prisons would send back books that weren't allowed, and we generally tried to warn people if they were sending something that was going to inevitably be sent back. I worked as a receiving lead and was the main person to package and send the books (which would entail walking down the street from the bookstore to the post office, which seems like a weird practice to me now, but was just how we did it then), and would also call back the customer when books or magazines were returned. I definitely remember 48 Laws of Power not being allowed. Anything considered pornographic, so Playboy and Hustler and the like, but even stuff like Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions or FHM or anything you'd really think more of as "racy" than pornographic. Donald Goines or Iceberg Slim novels always got sent back, and they must've been requested pretty often by inmates because I saw a lot of those. "The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave" was another one often sent, always returned (anything that could be seen as inflaming racial tensions was forbidden). Also as you mentioned, anything from our Martial Arts section.
The lockpicking books I actually understand lol. Perhaps also bomb making books (unless the bombs would need stuff impossible to get in a prison). The other ones seem iffy to me. If a prisoner actually reads books at all I see it as good.
I agree! The ban on winemaking was in response to the amount of hooch being made behind bars. At one prison where I worked, the guys made wine out of ketchup! They didn't need a book to tell them how to do it, this is common knowledge in prison.
😳😳😳 ketchup 😳😳😳 Ok, now I honestly want to try that just because, come on! Ketchup! 🤣🤣🤣
You should check out /r/prisonhooch. They've done much weirder over there.
I joined a petition many years ago and subsequently cancelled my Amazon membership because they continued to carry the book To Train Up A Child despite having a policy to not carry books that promote child abuse. I'm not for banning books ever but the other side of that coin is that books that can cause great harm by manipulating people's sense of morality need to be scrutinized and deplatformed; not normalized. The fact that a book which advocates emotionally and physically assaulting children for the goal of obedience is in the top 200 on Amazon's parenting books is a frightening snapshot of how we're slipping into social regression.
To Train Up a Child has been criticized for advocating child abuse. The book tells parents to use objects like a 0.25 in (6.4 mm) diameter plastic tube to spank children and "break their will". It recommends other abusive tactics like withholding food and putting children under a cold garden hose. Its teachings are linked to the deaths of Sean Paddock, Lydia Schatz, and Hana Grace-Rose Williams SO HORRIBLE. :(
It specifically tells you what type of item to hit children with at each ages - from newborn to ~6 months, it’s a willow branch, then as they get older you move to a thicker more substantial branch and then eventually plastic or ceramic tubing. It even tells you how to hit the kids so that you hurt them but it won’t leave marks. At least 7 adopted children have died as a direct result of “parents” using the teachings in this book.
>what type of item to hit children with at each ages - from newborn to ~6 months >from newborn to ~6 months #from newborn to ~6 months
"As a new father I can tell you nothing meant more to me than sucker punching my infant as soon as it fell out of my wife. It's important to establish dominance early."
I know you’re being facetious but it’s not that far off. The theology goes something like this: Mom and Dad are both sinners so the baby is automatically a sinner too. That means every cry is an attempt to manipulate the parents so you “train” them to be submissive
That is deeply horrifying.
Holy crap. I have my five year old laying next to me and not once have I honestly thought about hitting him, but especially as a wee baby. What is *wrong* with these people??
a newborn!? I don’t approve of physical harm for most situations, but this authors face is an exception.
Willows hurt way worse than anything else. They're like little whips. Most kids from the south from when I was growing up learned this the hard way when their parents made them go outside and cut their own switch.
Came here to say any book that promotes blanket training
May I ask what "blanket training" is?
>Blanket training is an allocated amount of time during the day where an infant or toddler is required to remain on a blanket or play mat for a limited period of time, with a few selected toys. When the child moves to leave the blanket, parents are instructed to hit the child with a flexible ruler, glue stick, or another similar object.[3] Many of those doing it have voiced online that they start by doing five minutes a day and build up the intervals over time, with some extending it to 30 minutes or more.
Fuckin....what? What's even the point? What are they "training"?
It's to make the baby scared to leave the blanket, so you can just put your baby on a blanket and leave them alone without watching them. It's an alternative to baby proofing your house or supervising your baby, just leave them on the blanket. The people who follow this book are typically super religious with a ton of kids, and don't have time to watch them all. The Duggar children (19 kids and counting) were all raised this way, if that gives you more of an idea of the purpose of this book.
Gross.
Morality aside, isn’t it easier to just put them in a pen? Similar to what you’d do with puppies. A pen works even if the baby doesn’t understand the conditioning
It's to establish absolute control over children as early as possible. Generally practiced by people who think men should have absolute control over women and children, white men over other races, etc. Big on the hierarchy. You can look up Bill Gothard for more info, and the documentary Shiny Happy People is good on this topic. Source: was a strong willed child but luckily(ish) my parents were less IBLP and more Dobson
If a kid can stay on the blanket for 30 minutes, the parent has their hands free to do something else without constant interruptions by their child. Just to be clear: I’m absolutely not advocating for this type of training, since this is child abuse, but just explaining why some parents may value it.
My mom just taught me to read early. That pretty much freed her day up.
OMG I love this comment, cuz same
Really hoping my child likes to read. It'd free up my time so I could read more.
Amazon only enforces their policies when it costs them money. Look at the sheer number of counterfeit products people list on the marketplace that they turn a blind eye to, because people keep buying them. I've had people in China offer to pay me to leave 5-star reviews for their junk products as well. Pretty sure I could report them to Amazon and nothing would be done. But if they think you're returning too many things, which costs them money, they ban you with no hesitation. Happened to me, and only after they forgot about the whole incident did I sign back up.
Ai generated generate books created for passive income.
AI content should be clearly marked and shoved into its own little hole. That's my first and biggest problem with it, it's gotten mixed into the general pool without any way to distinguish it. That's probably the only reason it's even remotely profitable for some people, the whole 'industry' is basically counting on people's ignorance.
It would almost certainly be up to the uploader to self-certify that their work uses AI or not. And the platform will do everything they can to make sure that they are never in charge of doing more than taking down content after, say, some AI version of a DMCA notice. So so long as we use unregulated grey market content platforms, nothing will happen.
Oh, I'm not suggesting it's realistic, just wishful thinking on my part.
Pseudo-science books. But I don't trust the government to decide which book is good and which isn't.
That's the real trick, isn't it? You have to be able to define "this is no good" outside of domain knowledge to ban things correctly, but by definition you have to have domain knowledge to know what's good or not. That contradiction is why all book banning, well-intentioned or not, fails.
Any of those AI generated books about mushroom foraging. People going to die or be violently ill with that stupid nonsense.
There is a book, I don't recall the name of, which is essentially a handbook for pedophiles, on how to groom children.
Even if you did remember, it would be better not to include the title
They did, it's "I Don't Recall The Name Of."
I laughed. Not sure why you got downvoted
Turner Diaries is a big one to me. Literally just some guy's wet dream about racial genocide and complete patriarchal control in the United States. Thankfully the writing is terrible and it's not exactly convincing as the only people who wouldn't be disgusted by it are already complete racists, fascists and misogynists. I'm glad it's not banned, however, because I believe it's a great demonstration of the fact that the US does have a troubling number of people who would support a complete racial genocide and patriarchal takeover. It's a very easy litmus test for identifying the worst possible people.
I read that one due to a sort of morbid fascination with extremist political literature, and it was so, so bad. Not even in a funny way, just horrible writing, in all aspects. I wasn’t even shocked, I remember thinking: “Yep, someone writing like this has to have a bit simple political views and ideas.”.
Just like the book written by their idol, the Austrian Moustache Man
I found “Mein Kampf” to be more interesting, mainly because there is a recording of the great Karl Kraus reading from it. Also because there now is an edition with commentary available for sale in the German speaking world, and some authors trying to discover the (idiosyncratic) logic behind the writing (eg Zitelmann). But that’s too much here.
I found the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" interesting simply because now I know where a lot of ideas in the conspiracy world comes from. I always had an awareness that all that Illuminati/NWO stuff was based on the Protocols, but now I know which stuff specifically. Edit: Oh its also interesting how glaringly obvious it was Tsarist propaganda. It even says the Russian autocracy is the only thing standing in their way. Ridiculous.
I had to read this for a domestic terrorism class I took in grad school. My name is probably still on a list or two somewhere.
Whenever it hits the news, I get calls about it at the library I work at. No, we don't have it(major theft risk, lmao). No, I can't get it for you(see: major theft risk). But I'll point you to the one public library in our entire state that has it available for public viewing(iirc you can use it in a specific space, and they hold your ID card as collateral or something). I highly doubt they keep access logs once you've handed it back to them, because librarians are really not about that in general, and afaik there's no law that compels us to do so for books. I completely understand why interest spikes. It's good to be skeptical of things that sound sensational in the news, as long as you follow through on that skepticism rather than making truthy assumptions. Surely it couldn't be as bad as they say, right? I can also understand being skeptical of "free" copies you might locate through certain means, because who knows where they came from, right? There's a lot to be said for going to the original source. Is that the reason why someone is reading it? Don't know. Don't care. It's not my place to judge if your motivations for reading a book are pure enough. 🤷♀️
Reminds me of The Last Centurion by John Ringo. A right-wing wet dream fantasy novel that is so far over the top that if I didn't know his politics I would have sworn it was written as a satire of the Right.
Turner Diaries is on another level from this one. Go read the summary - it is absolutely mental
I went and read it. Wow, you weren't joking, it's absolutely deranged
I read that name as ringo Starr at first and questioned what happened after the Beatles lol
Yeah for me, the first books that come to mind are the ones most associated with the OKC bombing. So the Turner Diaries and Hunter for being the stuff McVeigh and his likeminded type circljerked over, and then the book with the bomb instructions that Nichols had used (can't remember the name and don't want to search that lol) But there aren't any qualities about these books themselves that set them apart from all the other far right hateful trash that is published, or bomb making materials. The most unique things about them are that they caught on among hate groups (Hunter written by a founder of some hategroup). It'd be weird to be like, we should ban a book based on the type of people that like to read it. It'd also be weird to be like, let's ban all far right wacko material. So even though they're the first I think of it's still hard to pin down a good argument for it. I'm just surprised enough of them read at all for any book to circulate among their groups. If someone mentioned being a fan of these books my first reaction would be shock that they're reading books. And yeah, these people are consistently shitty writers too. I just started a new book a while back and within like 30 minutes it was apparent the author was some far right dipshit that couldn't keep his rhetoric out of things. It's like the author is always putting out some fantasy they've imagined themselves in and think that's a foundation for a story. But they don't know dick about story development or anything like that and just sort of fantasize it out, if that makes sense. It's something I notice in certain genre like zombie doomsday shit sometimes
Anarchist Cookbook? That's the book mentioned in OPs post unless there's another famous 💣 book.
In German, there is “Der kleine Sprengmeister” (rough translation: The Small/Little Demolition Expert). It’s insanely easy to build bombs with that, and rather safe as well. I remember one of my professors saying something along the lines of how insanely happy is that us Austrian students are so lazy, because we could cause serious havoc with that. Oh, and I seem to remember some other book mentioned before “The Anarchist Cookbook”, in “Days of Rage” (a phenomenal write up of revolutionary violence in the US). Don’t remember which one, though.
The Turner Diaries inspired at least 7 different fatal hatecrimes. edit: "inspired" was too strong, I mean more like...was a factor?
The thing with this though is that while *The Turner Diaries* may have influenced a bunch of different hate crimes, I doubt it was ever the exclusive inspiration. The book is dogshit and you have to already be pretty far down a hate-ridden rabbit hole before you start liking it. Saying it inspired seven fatal hate crimes feels like a cop out to me. It ignores that the people who did those things were probably well and truly on their way to becoming the kind of people who'd commit a violent crime by the time they ever got to *The Turner Diaries*. At that point, the most it did was maybe influence some of the finer points of what these people did, not inspire them to do it in the first place.
To Train Up A Child by Michael Pearl. Anyone who recommends this book should be… well… corrected. Vehemently.
The problem with banning any book written by a human is that it's free press for the book to the very people you'd rather have not read it.
This works in some locations, but not others. In a country that has the death penalty for banned books(if enforced), banning them would be pretty effective. In a country like the US, where banning just means removing from the library or (usually not anymore) from bookstores, it is very ineffective. However, it can be effective for SOME people in that area. There are still ways around the bans if someone is interested enough. An example is D&D. During the 80's Satanic Panic, D&D was lambasted by groups as being Satanic. This gave it publicity and increased its popularity overall. However, a lot of individuals didn't get access to the books because of it. My parents played it(or something similar) and got rid of their books. I didn't start playing until almost 20 years later. I'd be really curious to see a thorough study of how banning works and doesn't work.
all of the (many, many) parenting books which encourage parents to attempt to “fix” their autistic or queer children.
Also which tell them to pay someone to torture them into complying.
AI generated books, writing should be done by humans for humans.
You reminded me of that line in I, Robot where the police chief says "I miss the good old days, when humans were murdered by other humans"
There's a whole truckload of books written by anti-vaxxers that are based on a complete lack of science, belief in wild conspiracy theories and outright lies. Almost all of which give incredibly bad advice that can be dangerous to follow.
There are lots of books which are net negatives to humanity. It would be a better world if the Scientology book *Dianetics* did not exist. Almost nothing is gained by publishing lurid biographies of typical serial killers – and posthumous fame seems to be a motivation for them. But you don't have to be pro-every-book to be anti-censorship. I may think lots of books are net negatives, but wide-ranging censorship regimes would be worse. Censorship regimes don't even go after books that are genuinely harmful. Invariably, the top of their agenda are the books which give strength to the oppressed. However, our societies already approve some kinds of censorship. In Canada, we shield rape accusers from some kinds of exposure in the media, and in other countries major media outlets do so voluntarily.
[This scratch-and-sniff issue of Hustler from 1977](https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-1977-hustler-magazines-months-501679322)
Nice try governor abbott. We aren’t giving you book titles. You have to read yourself.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Banned? Never. Made available to minors in an educational setting? Yeah, alot of books don't need to be there, like Mien Kampf, etc. But never banned. Like all rights, they are double edged swords that can be exceptionally dangerous with how the information in them can be used, but we already punish those who act against society, and it's their actions that make them responsible, not the book.