• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

BillBrasky Memorial Political Chat Thread

deaconson said:
I'm sorry. I spent many years in El Paso as a kid. Not a fan.
Click to expand...
more like


Mi5qcGVn.jpeg
 
This is colossally fucked

A Message from Scholastic on U.S. Book Fairs | Scholastic Media Room

mediaroom.scholastic.com mediaroom.scholastic.com

I remember the Book Fair being a total highlight of my childhood, my folks encouraging my curiosity and letting me buy the books I wanted shaped the person I have become

The idea that Scholastic would facilitate their own censorship and exclusion is so rough. All of this stuff is just getting buried under bigger stories right now.
 
Scholastic is creating a little ghetto for all the “other” books.
 
TownieDeac said:
This is colossally fucked

A Message from Scholastic on U.S. Book Fairs | Scholastic Media Room

mediaroom.scholastic.com mediaroom.scholastic.com

I remember the Book Fair being a total highlight of my childhood, my folks encouraging my curiosity and letting me buy the books I wanted shaped the person I have become

The idea that Scholastic would facilitate their own censorship and exclusion is so rough. All of this stuff is just getting buried under bigger stories right now.
Click to expand...
F d
But link's not coming up for me. ID10T error? Maybe
 
deaconson said:
F d
But link's not coming up for me. ID10T error? Maybe
Click to expand...
Hm not sure. Can copy the text, it’s from their “Media room”:

Scholastic provides diverse titles to every Book Fair.

There have been a number of misconceptions that we want to clarify about how we have created a path to host Scholastic Book Fairs, even as schools and educators in the U.S. navigate restrictions imposed on them by state legislation and local policy. The biggest misconception is that Scholastic Book Fairs is putting all diverse titles into one optional case. This is not true, in any school, in any location we serve.

There is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 U.S. states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools – mostly LGBTQIA+ titles and books that engage with the presence of racism in our country. Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools, where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.

To continue offering these books, as well as even more high interest titles, we created an additional collection called Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice for our U.S. elementary school fairs. We cannot make a decision for our school partners around what risks they are willing to take, based on the state and local laws that apply to their district, so these topics and this collection have been part of many planning calls that happen in advance of shipping a fair.

We don’t pretend this solution is perfect – but the other option would be to not offer these books at all – which is not something we’d consider. There is a wide range of diverse titles throughout every book fair, for every age level. And, we continue to offer diverse books throughout our middle school fairs, which remain unchanged.

All children need to see themselves in stories and it is extremely unsettling to consider a world in which they don’t. Scholastic’s commitment remains unshakeable to publish and distribute stories representative of ALL voices.
 
I don't understand what they are saying their doing. Maybe I've had too many drank
 
So, this is Scholastic knuckling under to culture war bullshit? Wouldn't want to hurt anybody's feelings based on their preconceived notions. It's a copout, isn't it?
 
mercurydime said:
So, this is Scholastic knuckling under to culture war bullshit? Wouldn't want to hurt anybody's feelings based on their preconceived notions. It's a copout, isn't it?
Click to expand...
It’s not wanting to give up the golden goose.

The company I work for makes most of its money from academic journals. We sold individual subscriptions to Chinese citizens for many years, but never institutions. Because most (all?) Chinese universities are state run, they wanted unilateral ability to censor the works that their institutions subscribed to and made available in their libraries. Sometime in the mid 2010s the floodgates started to open, and China started to do big deals with western publishing houses, notably tens of millions of dollars to Elsevier and Wiley for big package deals.

My company firmly held against censorship of our authors’ work, but after surveying the community, reached a compromise agreement. We purchased server space on premises in Chinese territory and hosted a local version there of all of our content, and the government could choose how to license it and disperse it from there. It always felt like a copout to me, but we were leaving millions on the table, and it also opened the way for Chinese authors to be able to submit their works to our journals, and as a mission driven social justice organization, broadening the fields was more important in the end. Still doesn’t sit right with me, but it’s a grey area.

The idea that a publisher would do this in America, facilitate its own censorship, is horrifying to me.
 
TownieDeac said:
It’s not wanting to give up the golden goose.

The company I work for makes most of its money from academic journals. We sold individual subscriptions to Chinese citizens for many years, but never institutions. Because most (all?) Chinese universities are state run, they wanted unilateral ability to censor the works that their institutions subscribed to and made available in their libraries. Sometime in the mid 2010s the floodgates started to open, and China started to do big deals with western publishing houses, notably tens of millions of dollars to Elsevier and Wiley for big package deals.

My company firmly held against censorship of our authors’ work, but after surveying the community, reached a compromise agreement. We purchased server space on premises in Chinese territory and hosted a local version there of all of our content, and the government could choose how to license it and disperse it from there. It always felt like a copout to me, but we were leaving millions on the table, and it also opened the way for Chinese authors to be able to submit their works to our journals, and as a mission driven social justice organization, broadening the fields was more important in the end. Still doesn’t sit right with me, but it’s a grey area.

The idea that a publisher would do this in America, facilitate its own censorship, is horrifying to me.
Click to expand...
It is horrifying - I loved those book fairs as well. You can make a very strong argument that conservatives are simply winning their war on public ed right now, and liberals are losing more and more of these kinds of battles. There's a thread on this board on Chris Rufo, who is one of the right-wing ringleaders in the attack on education, from elementary schools to the college level. Conservatives have created and are funding nationwide organizations, like Moms for Liberty, to ban books, take over school boards, etc., and they're aggressively pursuing a well-organized PR campaign to undermine public ed and attack any group or person that supports it, such as Scholastic. These are dark times for American education, and it's likely only going to get worse.
 
I’m not sure if they’re winning the culture war or just using the political wars they’ve won to fight a well-resourced culture war front. I doubt this plan has more than 35-40% support nationally. But it doesn’t matter unless it hurts Republicans in a primary.

There’s little organized pushback from the left besides counter protests or individual resistance from teachers and other education professionals. I don’t recall any major statement from the White House, Senate Dems, or House Dems. I haven’t heard any legal strategy to challenge these laws on behalf of students, teachers, or Black and queer authors. So I can understand why Scholastic surveys the landscape and thinks setting up a cis straight Whites only bookshelf is the best way to stay in business. I doubt they want to but they don’t see leadership or allies to help them.
 
dartsndeacs said:
Isn’t that doing a disservice to the people whom you champion? Like all the people who are suffering in the hellish conditions of Gaza, if they had the opportunity you had to live free in America do you think they’d waste it by being so unhappy with world events that it’d get them worked up to the point that they’d be unhappy living here and stating that they want to live in Ireland instead?
Click to expand...

@dartsndeacs I wanted to move my response to this here because I think its too far off topic on the Israel thread.

I don’t know how you synthesize knowledge and awareness of events. you seem to maintain an emotional distance from the meaning of events, which allows you to keep a very personal narrow focus in your life. Maybe you disagree, but that’s what I read from you. How much of that is innate for you, vs intentional, I don’t know.

I am not like that. It’s very important and fulfilling to me to keep up with news related to the human condition, and I am very inclined to follow the conditions for poor and oppressed people. That’s not to say i’m a martyr or some saint, i’m not giving all my possessions away and volunteering every day, or running for office. Having said that, these are the things that I care about and I am driven to learn about. This is also something that affects me non an emotional level. For some fucked up reason I enjoy things that make me sad. The art, music, movies that I cherish are frequently very sad. Being sad is not something that I am complaining about or trying to avoid. My problem with being American is being represented by people and institutions that I believe are cruel. Not only cruel, but having an intractable character that villainizes those who disagree with it and want to change it.

I don’t want to ignore things, distract myself, or harden my heart. I am who I am. I just would much rather live in a culture that doesn’t disagree so strongly with my spirit. That doesn’t mean that i’m not grateful for my life or the privileges I have, but I do think that I could have almost all of those conditions elsewhere. It’s my children’s relationships with their grandparents that’s keeping me here, not Walmart and tacos.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top