Thread: Missouri public school bans Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five'.
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Old 08-02-2011, 11:17 PM   #221
EatingPie
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer View Post
It's not exactly the same thing and you know it. We both don't know these board members, but we both know Dawkins. "Know" as in background or track-record.
I misinterpreted, string two sentences together inappropriately. I thought you were saying you didn't trust the school board members because you didn't know them. But you distrust them because of their conclusion about Slaughterhouse 5. So my accusation about loss of rational debate was not legitimate. My apologies!

Quote:
And I didn't throw out any evidence, anyway. I don't know them, sure, but I'm not throwing them to the wolves based on that alone. I'm using that plus the opinion that anyone who truly believes that Slaughterhouse Five is inappropriate (because of language and sexual content) for high-school aged kids to read isn't thinking rationally. So I'm left with an irrational decision or a decision based on "other" facts not in evidence. Because nothing else makes remote sense to me.
The evidence I was referring to was the evidence presented in the article, basically the only evidence about this situation that we have. (Though there is now a comment, and an editorial quoted in the thread.)

The school board stated their criteria included language. I grepped the f-word, and the book had about 20 uses. Right there is proof that the book would be removed due to language, as stated. So there is nothing "irrational" about that: they had a stated criteria, and the book failed that criteria.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mldavis2 View Post
Then we have the spot-on post from @DiapDealer questioning the graph found by @EatingPie, which effectively suggests that the stated reasons for banning are often a superset of an ulterior undercurrent (we shouldn't be using the "R" word in this forum).
Obviously I don't see it as spot-on. As I stated, the ALA had a specific metric for "religion" too.

And as I show above, the book certainly uses strong language, and since that was a stated reason for removing the book, there is no reason to believe they lied about it, or it fit a "superset of ulterior undercurrent."

As I stated in my first post here, the religion complaint started the process, but it was not the reason for the banning. So, why are we (a) assuming it still is the reason for the banning, and why aren't we talking about the actual reasons for banning?

If we are truly opposed to banning books, barking up the wrong tree gets us nowhere in terms of making any social change. And yet there is actual resistance to the idea of finding the right tree!

-Pie
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