7 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
  2. Nov 2022
    1. BROOKE GLADSTONE In the Tennessee State Assembly last April, Representative Jerry Sexton took on this question.   [CLIP]   JERRY SEXTON Let's say you take these books out of the library. What are you going to do with them? You can put them on the street, let them on fire.    JERRY SEXTON I don't have a clue, but I would burn them.

      Tennessee State Representative would burn banned books

      It's true: Representative says he would burn books deemed inappropriate by state – Tennessee Lookout

  3. May 2022
    1. Every bit of new information fills in the blanks of a time that has long since passed out of living memory.

      Our written records have increased incalculably because our living memory doesn't serve us or our society or culture the way it previously did in pre-literate times. The erasure of cruelties and tyrrany is all to easy when we rely only on literacy, particularly when book banning and erasure can easily become the norm.

  4. Jan 2022
    1. Books can indeed be dangerous. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.

      —Viet Thanh Nguyen

  5. Jan 2021
  6. May 2015
    1. Transhumanists are at war with the bioconservatives. This just sounds like a William Gibson sci-fi novel. We live in amazing times. That said, global bans on technology and science never work; they just really mess things up. Regardless of what the bioconservatives think, there are cultures that will embrace these technologies (and already do). Historically, and possibly without exception, countries that ban or hobble new technologies eventually regret it because at least some of their neighbors will not follow suit. Further, by outright turning their back on the technology, they lose any voice they might have had in determining how it will be employed.