Book banning in Scotland, almost but not quite

[Bomb#20]

The contention was that something wrong, but we'll meaning, could be more harmful than an overtly wrong thing.

Oh for the love of god. You contend a lot of things; it's not up to you to define one of them as "The" contention. That something wrong but well meaning could be more harmful than an overtly wrong thing is not the contention in dispute; it's just a painfully trite generality about the human condition. The contention in dispute is that To Kill a Mockingbird is a specific example of this generic "could be" phenomenon, and that the "wrong" and "harmful" thing about TKAM is that it's racist.

For you to offer your "could be" as evidence for your specific contention about TKAM is akin to you saying "People murder one another" and then claiming you've provided evidence that Swammerdami dropped Jimmy Hoffa into the East River with cement shoes.

The autobiographical part is about that happening, the consummation of the point.

It absolutely supports the point. So either I am a liar, and you can damn well say it or you can pipe down maybe ya?

yes. You did. In implying that my autobiographical consummation of the the point as invalid. Either I lived it happening, and it is a clear example or I did not, and I am a liar. That is how reality works.

The charitable interpretation of all that is it wasn't the real you who said all that; that was the bath salts talking.

You do, however, have to actually quite the part where I'm talking about myself to actually quote me talking about myself.

Been there; done that. And you quoted it back to me so stop insinuating that I didn't.

"As to why this is worse than even intentional racism" is a beginning of a thesis.
...
"Maybe it's just a function of being born in a day and age where the world had already started to advance past what I was taught even while I was being taught it, but I can recognize when those things I learned and valued are to be set aside as childish things." is autobiographical, and an implication that the books are childish, so an opinion... supported by the rest of my post. This is what you call a "conclusion" and is normally a part of any well formed argument.

Yes, yes, and as we all know, "An argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition." Any medieval theologian could have done as well. He'd have had thesis, premises, inferences, lemmas, syllogisms, and a conclusion, thereby establishing in his own mind all manner of definite propositions about the nature of God; but that wouldn't change the reality that his argument contains no facts about God. That's how well-formed arguments work: garbage in, garbage out.

See, in order for you to justify your claim that TKAM is racist, at some point, somewhere in your logorrhea, you would need to say something like "TKAM is racist because the protagonist is Scout and she used the 'N'-word.", or "TKAM is racist because some of the black people in it are portrayed as illiterate.", or whatever the bejesus it was you saw in that book that you've since decided means it's racist. That would be introducing a fact about the book. That would elevate your argument above the level of mere theology.

"I can see when someone is being awful on purpose, generally speaking." is an initial observation of fact. That I made it and impugning it's "autobiographicality" is in fact an insinuation that my observation is either flawed.. but "autobiographical" is not "fallacious".

No, it's not an insinuation of any sort. Your observation may well be perfectly correct; it's certainly not fallacious. I pointed out its autobiographicality in order to assert -- not insinuate -- that "I can see when someone is being awful on purpose, generally speaking." is a fact about you. It is not a fact about To Kill a Mockingbird. This is not rocket science.

"It's kind of the point most times, anyway. If they aren't telegraphing it, it would make them awful at being awful." Is an observation on human nature. Either refute it or accept it.

An observation on human nature is not an observation on TKAM. Duh!

'It has taken years and years, however, to discern behaviors and thought patterns I got from those very titles as "trying, and failing, to be the right thing".' is reality. We are born in ignorance. Again, either refute it or accept it.

Good grief. If somebody said to you "I felt God talking to me. It was a real experience. Refute it or accept it.", would you refute it or accept it? You don't have to refute it or accept it. No doubt the guy experienced something; you weren't there in his head, so you don't know what he experienced, so you're in no position to know whether some alternate explanation you come up with accounts for the fact of his experience well enough to qualify as a refutation. So what? We do not accept other people's religious experiences as evidence for the correctness of whatever theological interpretation they choose to put on them.

If you used to think a certain way, and then you decided that way of thinking was a failure to be the right thing, well, since you have provided zero factual details of what that way of thinking is, I am in no position to evaluate whether that way of thinking really is a failure to be the right thing; whether you really learned that way of thinking from reading TKAM, as opposed to learning it from OMAM, or learning it from the entirety of your experiences up to that point, or developing it from your own random neural wiring; and if you did learn it from TKAM whether that was Harper Lee's fault for teaching it as opposed to your own fault for being a poor student who let Ms. Lee's points fly right over your head. Since you elected not to expand on your subjective feelings about your experience with any facts whatsoever, no, I will not "refute it or accept it". Get a clue. That is not how human persuasion works.

"the heavy-handed delivery specifically of those two stories" is literary criticism, and one you can either refute or one you can accept.

It's trivial to find professional reviews of TKAM that praise its deft storytelling. You know what opinions are like that everyone has one of.

'If you were born in, say, 1945, I can see a great deal of progressive thought in those books.... But again, that's "if you were born in 1945".' is an implication that anyone who thinks these books are free of such pernicious racism as hopelessly dated in their own opinions

Yeah, I caught that. It's the 2021 version of "If you won't take my word for it that she's a witch, you must be a witch too."

"The fact is, I see media that was good in 1995 that is no longer good now." is fact. Even The Fresh Prince had a large vein of Minstrel culture baked into it. It was good in 1995, bit it's not good today

And here you put the root of the problem on full display: you are systematically unable to distinguish between what is fact and what is opinion, between what is objective and what is subjective.

Even if we were to accept for the sake of discussion the highly controversial philosophical thesis that artistic aesthetics is objective, why the bejesus should anyone believe that you, Jarhyn, have some special expertise on aesthetics and he should take your word over his own subjective opinion?

'The "classics" are but the biggest fish in a small, stagnant pond.' is a thesis, supported by later text that you omitted,

No, it bloody well was not. Your later text supported the thesis that the pond was small. Your later text did not in any way support the thesis that the pond was stagnant.

namely a description of the log scale growth of both population and technology.

Bingo! You mathematically quantified pond size. You did not mathematically quantify stagnation.

"Today, the pond is bigger, and there are bigger fish in it." is again a fact, and you again omit the pertinent points of support so as to frame it as such.

No, "Today, the pond is bigger" is a fact. "There are bigger fish in it." is opinion.

'I wouldn't drop these books from the curriculum because they are "racist" though they are, in a pernicious way worse even than actual intentional racism.' is olinion... Again backed up by arguments of mechanism which you fail to answer to.

Arguments of generic mechanism that contained no facts about TKAM.

"If people want to read them on their own time, I will gladly provide copies, alongside plentiful discussion on how the contents of them have been dated. I will not, however, ever assign such." is a concession that I still do not believe in banning books, and it places bounds on the degree which even my own desire to form a sane curriculum would take me. It is the proof that such view are not leading me even so far as the OP whinges.

Well good for you for being such a superior life form. Our dispute is not over the OP's whinges about book banning, but over your whinges about TKAM's alleged racism.

 

[jab]

"If you were born in 1945, etc"--in virtue signaling you're not racist, you lapse into ageism.
As someone born slightly later than that (but not much), and as someone who is a faculty member in a university English Department, and has three degrees in English literature, let me say that I have not read To Kill a Mockingbird, and probably never will--it never seemed an interesting and highly canonical book to me--and if the movie is any example, probably a bit formulaic. As for Of Mice and Men, all I can say it "It's no Grapes of Wrath, and very disappointing." If Scottish students need a thought-provoking novel to read, they could try Scott's The Heart of Midlothian or Ivanhoe or Eliot's Silas Marner. Until the 1960s, these somewhat gender-bending novels were staples on pre-University English courses, and their replacement with newer, and not always better books by 20th century authors didn't occasion much fuss. So now we have a couple of 20th-century books not being yanked from school libraries, but simply removed from the required readings in courses, and replaced with only more recent books dealing with racism --instead of, including, say--a classic slave narrative by Douglass, or Equiano, or Jacobs, or Northup.
I just finished teaching Jacobs' masterpiece Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in a second-year University class, and students were exclaiming how it brought home and made into vivid lived experience the facts about slavery and racism that they had studied in high school history/ social studies.

 

[jab]

The most charitable characterization I can give your OP is bizarrely poor judgement. Perhaps you are imitating the The Woke?

Well, there is that. Progressives have been leading the way for decades in calling attempts by prissy folk to remove books like The Catcher in the Rye from school curricula "book banning", and calling news stories they felt the mainstream media didn't adequately cover "censored". When you degrade the language, you can't expect to keep a monopoly on it.

good point

 

[TomC]

I have not read To Kill a Mockingbird, and probably never will--it never seemed an interesting and highly canonical book to me--and if the movie is any example, probably a bit formulaic.

This seems rather the point, to me.

TKAM was cutting edge, groundbreaking, stuff 60 years ago. And for a long time afterwards.

But lots of other stuff has been written since then. I'm sure plenty of newer works serve as better teaching tools. Anybody who's interest in TKAM is piqued can easily find it and read it for themselves.
Tom

 

[jab]

Bomb 20:

It's not an issue of the small sample size. The autobiographical facts Jarhyn keeps introducing are all facts about him. So they are a valid type of evidence for us to draw conclusions about him. None of them are facts about To Kill a Mockingbird. We can legitimately conclude from his reports that at some point he read the book and now in retrospect he feels it was racist. That is not evidence that it was racist. Evidence that it was racist would necessarily have to contain facts about the book.

yes, that makes sense

 

[Jarhyn]

"If you were born in 1945, etc"--in virtue signaling you're not racist, you lapse into ageism.
As someone born slightly later than that (but not much), and as someone who is a faculty member in a university English Department, and has three degrees in English literature, let me say that I have not read To Kill a Mockingbird, and probably never will--it never seemed an interesting and highly canonical book to me--and if the movie is any example, probably a bit formulaic. As for Of Mice and Men, all I can say it "It's no Grapes of Wrath, and very disappointing." If Scottish students need a thought-provoking novel to read, they could try Scott's The Heart of Midlothian or Ivanhoe or Eliot's Silas Marner. Until the 1960s, these somewhat gender-bending novels were staples on pre-University English courses, and their replacement with newer, and not always better books by 20th century authors didn't occasion much fuss. So now we have a couple of 20th-century books not being yanked from school libraries, but simply removed from the required readings in courses, and replaced with only more recent books dealing with racism --instead of, including, say--a classic slave narrative by Douglass, or Equiano, or Jacobs, or Northup.
I just finished teaching Jacobs' masterpiece Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in a second-year University class, and students were exclaiming how it brought home and made into vivid lived experience the facts about slavery and racism that they had studied in high school history/ social studies.

Thank you. It feels nice to not be a voice alone here. In many ways, I expect TKAM to be the source of some of it's formulae.

As might be evidenced, I just read LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness and I would in fact as much recommend that as any other to the reading list. It's sad that I could not in this way include both this and The Dispossessed; to do so would be to cheat some other author. I will actually pick up those titles next that you recommend.

Apologies for the ageism; I would, however, hope people remind me in my old age that I must not as so many do deign to letting my early teachings hold too much sway over later knowledge.