We've banned this account for repeatedly posting ideological flamebait with a consistent flavor over several years. HN is for curious conversation, not this.
I chose books that were out of copyright, available from project Gutenberg, and had been banned or challenged in the USA at some point in the past to use as examples. There weren't many options. It's designed so the user can include whatever books are important to them wherever they may live. They may live somewhere more oppressive where banned books are a common occurrence. I have no idea. It wouldn't be wise to include copyrighted works in a public repository where I live.
The mitigation here is to make it only turn on after 60 days. most places don't store cctv footage for more than a month, so if you have a dummy period, by the time it's noticed, the footage will be gone
I get it's a joke but in case someone thinks it'ss serious, unless you install it literally in the middle of nowhere with no CCTVs and also no one to connect to it, you will only stand out more in the crowd as you make your escape...
Put dollar store lamp with enabled lightbulb in backpack. Enter library. Scope out cameras. Find outlet in blind spot. Install lamp and bulb. Drop hints like qr sticky notes, or riddles like don't ban books, turn ur bulb on. WinRAR.
If you put something the oppressive regime really doesn't like, finding who went into the blind spot in the time that the lamp appeared is easily automated. Ingress & egress are covered. You may get lucky but you might be gambling your family on it too.
Freedom has a price, people outside the regime (refugees of the regime) could explain and pay friends outside of the oppressive regime, to sell them at a loss (below market rate).
People inside the oppressive regime will unwittingly buy smart bulbs, that only activate after enough were smuggled in at the same date, so that by the time the regime detects some, all bulbs will be traced to non-refugee sellers outside its jurisdiction, absolving any unwitting participants buying and powering them, so it's important the ad doesn't advertise any quirks or functionality added, as that would compromise the buyers.
By having the sellers be random foreigners (from the perspective of the oppressive regime), the regime can't punish the family of the refugees sponsoring this infiltration, if it doesn't know which refugee friends the seller has (so it should also be a low contact friend, so the refugee would have to convince a friend to do one large batch once, and never meet again..., which is a bit sad).
This assumes commercial entities aren't selling friend network data, or if they do, that oppressive regimes somehow can't get their hands on it. A rather dubious assumption in 2026...
FBI? US don't even have enough CCTVs in US probably for this to be an issue. rickooooooo is talking about somewhere "more oppressive". You go into enough detail on events of 1989 and they are absolutely doing it over that over there. And if you think they need to "do gait analysis", don't worry, it's automatic.
> The idea is that if you drop this somewhere in public, you can try to match whatever color was there before so it is less noticeable that anything changed.
I *love* this concept so much.
Even though the books are a neat hook, these wifi networks could contain anything.
Grassroots political advocacy, local info for off-the-grid historical sites, location specific micro-social media (comments, message boards, etc.), waymarkers, geocaching, hidden music / art / games in obscure places, ARGs like an interactive capture the flag or something even more inventive and fun, ...
God, this is just so freaking cool and is begging for a thousand different ideas to run on top of it.
Good job! One of the best things I've seen all year.
Thanks. I had several ideas for these bulbs as well. This is the one I decided to act on for now. I might work on some of the others later but I'm not sure. I agree there are so many potential uses for this sort of thing and I love how they just sort of exist without drawing attention or suspicion.
As it stands it is a great example for others to learn from. If you include copyrighted books it’ll get pulled from GitHub and no one will learn from it.
github nor the government github is subject to cares about those books, for either political or copyright reasons, that's how. Are there any other silly questions?
This is a perfectly sensible set of sample and example books. The project is the book distribution system, not the books themselves.
You load yours up with whatever you think is important or whatever you are willing to risk.
> likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers
all 4 of the books that are checked-in to that repo are old enough that they're in the public domain. I looked at Call of the Wild and it has a title page saying it came from Project Gutenberg, I assume the other 3 likely did too.
rather than jumping to conclusions about the author being influenced by a "psyop" I think there's a much simpler and more boring explanation - they didn't want to check copyrighted ebooks into a publicly-accessible Codeberg repo.
I chose these books as examples precisely because they are out of copyright and available on project Gutenberg. They also had been banned or challenged on the USA in the past. Project Gutenberg has a list of "banned books" on their own website and these are all included.
They appear to all be public domain. Even if they weren't, grandparent could've just called out that these are not really banned books instead of being pretentious with the "psyop" thing.
Whether or not a psyop exists, it's presumptuous to say the author has fallen victim of it. Also suggests you're immune or something.
Also, the books on the bulb include Huckleberry Finn, which was removed from required reading in some Democrat-governed California cities because it uses racial slurs.
So if a book is banned by a widespread movement of extremists taking control of local governing bodies and the federal government is not involved, that's okay then?
that was the only point I was making. Mein Kraft, Selected Works of Lmao The Dong, and The Anarchist Cookbook may be removed from sale/access in some specific locations, but it is very much legal to buy, own, and sell them.
the US federal government historically banned books under the Comstock Act of 1873 which is still on the books and is still active federal law. it only currently isn't being enforced following some cultural changes in the 1960s. another change in the cultural winds could bring it back unfortunately
don't you have lots of those dormant old timey laws that would be promptly invalidated as unconstitutional if an attempt to enforce them was made these days, like sodomy laws were?
the Comstock act was unconstitutional at the time that it was actually enforced. i don't want to get into politics but there are many dynamic factors at work here
Your thought experiment asks: what if the banned book library contained out-of-print white supremacist books instead of historically banned books?
The answer should be obvious: it would be a white supremacist library.
Given that the present administration includes fans of those books, their banning seems unlikely. Perhaps a refresher on the kinds of books that are presently under threat is in order? https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
Books that are assigned reading in schools and universities, and promoted by libraries, are "under threat", while books nearly impossible to find, never on any reading lists, and whose promoters get their speeches shut down by French police [1], or get investigated by the FBI and kicked out of university [2], are to be considered widely available, got it.
And your "historically banned" is just "occasionally removed from public school libraries on parental request". Not using tax money to promote them to children is a low, low bar for "banned". While actual availability is, of course, completely ignored. Whatever tells the best story, facts be damned.
We've decided collectively as a society that some ideas are "good" and others are "bad". For example, racism and white supremacy have been decided to be "bad".
There's an alternate reality where white supremacy is mainstream, where queer fiction is impossible to find, and that would be a different world.
Instead, what's being preserved are the books written that celebrate the values that match our broad cultural values, despite a handful of cultural deviants attempting to suppress the parts of the rest of humanity they dislike.
It's not a lie. Some entity somewhere banned them. It's vague, not inaccurate.
You're just pissy because they aren't using your personal favorite parameters around "banned" for "by whom" and "for whom". You're pretending your opinion is fact and therefore anyone who disagrees must be a liar.
I'm curious of your take on one thing. Many of the sexuality oriented books (which your list is overwhelmingly composed of) tend to, unsurprisingly, have sexual content which is often rather explicit. Some of these books even have explicit artwork within them. I'm sure you'd agree that if books had ratings then many/all of these books would R, if not NC17, rated.
And even in high schools screening R-rated movies is generally heavily restricted. Where it is allowed, it generally requires a permission slip from the parents. And that's not like showing gratuitous films, but ones with historically relevant and educational context like e.g. Schindler's List.
So why is it unreasonable for parents (or other interested parties) to be against having such material in a children's library? In many ways its quite odd that a rating system was never adopted for books. And for one other question, do you even see a difference between these sort of books being restricted from schools, and other books whose content would be generally be rated appropriate for children, being banned on political/ideological basis? Because to me the difference is not only tremendous but the defining issue here.
"My" list? I don't have a list. If you're talking about OP's list, I disagree with that. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are not sexual books. From what I know of many of the other more recent books people have tried to ban, I absolutely would not agree the ratings would be R/NC17 for those either. Here's a list of PG13 (And PG!) movies with nudity. https://www.imdb.com/list/ls548607223/
I agree that 7 year olds should not be shown sexual content. There exists content with sexual themes which are appropriate for teenagers.
Also, the comment you replied to is downthread in an argument over whether it's a "lie" to call books that someone banned, a banned book.
I was referencing the one you were implicitly defending that started this line of chatter: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10 Most of the books from that list are widely available and easily accessible. The 'under threat' rhetoric is just from them being removed from some schools due to content being deemed age inappropriate. Those pg13 movies with nudity tend to be things like a few seconds of sideboob in a shower or whatever.
The top book on that 'challenged' list is a diary style book of a 13 year old girl who is sold into sex slavery, repeatedly raped, abused, and so on - with descriptions of each 'encounter.' The book is meant to be, and indeed is, extremely disturbing as it's part of the author's activism against sex trafficking throughout the world - as it was based on real events as per her research. In any case, it most certainly is not PG13 by any stretch of the imagination. It's much closer to something like Requiem for a Dream than it is to Tomb Raider.
I also think that's a great book to have on top, because it emphasizes that the issue isn't ideological, but content. I think there's few people who would claim Sold doesn't have tremendous value, or that it should be banned. But there's going to be a lot of people that don't want books like that anywhere near children. And for good reason - it's the same reason I wouldn't really care if my kids wanted to watch Total Recall or Terminator, but no way would I let them watch Requiem for a Dream. The violence and triple titted aliens of Total Recall are borderline comical, but I don't think stuff that gives you that awful 'ughhhh' feeling like Requiem for a Dream (or indeed - Sold) is something that's going to be at all healthy for a child's development.
We no longer say that "cannabis is illegal in California"; that would be factually incorrect. Instead we say, "cannabis was formerly illegal". In standard usage of English, the same pattern applies to banned vs formerly banned books.
It deliberately conveys an impression that is opposite of the truth. But feel free to continue to split hairs and twist words to argue that technically you're not actually lying.
Just because you decided to interpret something one way, doesn't mean it was a deliberate choice by the other party, nor does it mean your interpretation is common.
> technically you're not actually lying.
What did I say that you consider a lie? Could you quote me?
Reminds me of the "banned book" table every book store has now. The place where so called banned books are given the most prominent display in the whole store with discounts if you buy a novelty pencil or something alongside it.
I thought we would all be over this after the dr seuss thing.
Yes, I studied 'D.H.Lawrence's Women in Love' in college, yet I could not believe it when I saw its NSFW scenes played on all tv screens in a train in Ukraine in 1990, one passenger, a very old lady was loud and raucous and started shouting things that made everyone in the train laugh, I asked a Russian friend what she was saying and he said that she was blaming everyone why missed all those lovely tv shows with such things and had not watched anything as good when she was young. I think she meant that scene in page 246 if I recall it right from reading it in 1983.
>Y'know, there's really only one reason to be coy about whether you agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda.
Straight to the ad hominem attack on taboo thoughts. Transparent. If the books are true what is your problem with them? Not me. Not the other poster. Not a strawman fallacy. What is your issue with the content of actually banned books? Be specific.
Someone named tinfoilhatter replied but that's gone now. Not one to let a response go to waste:
Well. I seem to have triggered something.
> Ah yes, because the only people that have ever spread propaganda are Neo-Nazis
Not something I ever said or implied.
> and we should only ever learn about the sanitized and approved version of history from our Robert Maxwell (Ghislane Maxwell's Mossad agent father / McGraw Hill co-founder) published textbooks.
I find it interesting who just happens to know who else is Jewish, and then feels the need to interject that into utterly irrelevant contexts.
> Never mind that there are two sides to every story, and when it comes to history, only the victors get to tell theirs.
No, I'm pretty sure a lot of losers have been able to have their sides heard. It's just that, well, people lose for a reason, and losers tend to be less popular among normal people. Ranting about subhumans can do that, you know.
> We don't even learn about the 23+ million massacred by the Bolsheviks in school.
I would be interested to know who exactly you call a Bolshevik, but I did get taught the history of the USSR in school, at least, and "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" is not a ringing endorsement.
However, nobody was talking about Bolsheviks until you decided to use them as a distraction.
> But yeah - only one reason to consider a different perspective other than the one forced down your throat by the public education system.
I didn't need the public education system to teach me to hate genocidal racists, thank you.
> No but you said there was only a single reason to agree with "Neo-Nazi" propaganda as if agreeing with any propaganda is rational. There's a reason it's called propaganda after all. It's not like there weren't deplorable crimes being committed by the Soviets / US / France / Britain and they certainly had their fair share of propaganda during WWI and WWII depicting Germans as barbarians / sub-human / etc...
We're only talking about one political group here. The group that published The Turner Diaries. The group that can't help but mention who's Jewish. Bringing up other groups is a distraction tactic, aside from how dishonest it is. Yes, we are taught that everyone did morally questionable things in WWII. But only one group ran a Dachau.
> How is the owner of the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US, and the fact that he served in a Zionist intelligence organization in the US, irrelevant when it comes to what people learn about WWII and propaganda? Please explain.
OK, let's get down to brass tacks: Do you think people only believe the Holocaust happened and was bad because a Jewish man published a lot of textbooks?
> Are you disputing the well-recorded fact that tens of millions of innocents were killed by the Bolsheviks over the span of about 40 years?
Are you disputing the fact eleven million people were killed by a concerted effort on the part of Nazi Germany to eliminate people it considered subhuman for various reasons?
I don't dispute the vile stain on the history of state Communism. I hate Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Hoxha and Kim Il-Sung just as much as the next normal person. But we're talking about why someone wouldn't distribute The Turner Diaries and, I have to say, the Communists didn't commit that little literary peccadillo.
> Why don't we learn about the Holodomor in the US in grade school?
Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.
> I never said you did - but if it were me, I'd want to make sure I considered both sides of a historical event before deciding which direction to aim my hatred, if I was into such endeavors.
That's funny, the more I learn about WWII the less I feel the Nazis had a legitimate side. They were a bunch of losers lead around by a drugged-up corporal who ran his country into the ground with gross mismanagement to the point Germany, once the jewel of European science and industry, was split in half and lived a shadow existence as the puppet of two world powers for a half century after his reign.
> I personally believe that war is a racket, and that there are no good guys in evil and corrupt wars (WWII was definitely one of those, same with WWI).
The corruption in WWII was the starting of it, which falls directly at the feet of the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Self-defense is not corruption, and neither is ending the reign of expansionist tyrants. Or do you think people don't have the right to defend themselves from your pet dictators?
> I'm also not naive enough to believe that there wasn't atrocious behavior on both sides of either war.
Only one side ran death camps. Both sides imprisoned people unjustly, but only one side turned them into ashes. It doesn't balance out.
> Nor am I going to label anyone who has the gall to question the prevailing narrative or say it is incorrect in some capacity, a Neo-Nazi.
No, the only people I call Neo-Nazis are the ones triggered when I say the Nazis were, on the whole, bad for everyone around them.
is a strange example since it was just a complex of work camps, with the Japanese, British and so on having far worse than that.
> Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.
The hyperbole weakens the point / or where are you to see constant Nazis? In the US, Mexico and Germany I regularly see hammer and sickle flags, t-shirts and graffiti. In Mexico city right now, there are huge banners with Stalin and Lenin, besides Marx and Engels, draped across traffic lights and streets all over the center, while it's been almost 10 years since the only big nazi protest I'm aware of (Charlottesville)
As if Neo-Nazis were and are the only people capable of authoring propaganda. The Bolsheviks certainly were good at it, yet we don't learn about the 23+ million they massacred in US schools. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US (McGraw Hill) was co-founded by Ghislane Maxwell's Mossad agent father Robert? One can and should question the prevailing narrative when it comes to historical record. After all, the victors get to write it, and there are two sides to every story. You don't have to agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda to acknowledge that what we are taught about WWII and Weimar Germany in school, isn't the truth either.
Less than 8% of the English speaking world has heard of the Bolsheviks' genocide. And we know that's not an accident because Mossad's Robert Maxwell owned the dominant textbook publishing company in America for years.
If that simple, easily checkable fact doesn't get your hackles up I would know why that it doesn't.
No, the argument for distributing it would be that other propaganda is widely distributed without question, so if one wants to arrive at anything even close to an objective account of what transpired during that time in history, all propaganda should be examined and learned about. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle, and we certainly aren't getting to it by blindly accepting one narrative over another.
Extremism can be more-or-less objectively defined in terms of difference from the mean/median. Measurement is tricky but just because something has fuzzy boundaries doesn't mean it's meaningless. Especially when something is not near that fuzzy boundary.
> You don't have to agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda to acknowledge that what we are taught about WWII and Weimar Germany in school, isn't the truth either.
Both sides in the war were utterly disgusting. The allies firebombed cities full of innocent German civilians, and when the civilians would seek refuge in the only remaining buildings standing, the allies would bomb those. The soviets killed between 1.6 and 15 million in their gulag camp system, not to mention the millions they massacred, tortured, mutilated, etc... in Russia and on their march westward. We certainly learned a lot more about the war crimes Germany allegedly committed than the ones the allies allegedly did, and we certainly didn't learn about war crimes that were committed by the Soviets but blamed on the Germans. I went to school in the US.
Thank you for pointing this out. That list of “banned books” (that were unbanned long ago, and are now considered great literature) indeed seems more like virtue signaling.
There are equivalent books in our own time, and using those instead would make the project feel more like an actual defense of Free Speech and less like a quip of “goodness gracious, people were prudes in the 1920s”, which everyone already agrees with.
These are just examples I could legally include in a public github repository to demonstrate the functionality. The alternative would be to include copyrighted works or nothing. The user is free to include any books that are important to them.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, "books in our own time" tend to still be under copyright and might not survive long in a public code repository.
> But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.
putting hypothetical words in other peoples' mouths like this seems like it must be a pretty exhausting way to try to make a point.
quoting from the article:
> I think the idea hosting banned books specifically came to me after having read Ben Brown's short story Library. It's been a while since I read it, but if I recall there are characters in the story who maintain a "library" which acts as a digital archive of creative works, owners manuals, 3d models, etc. Things that others might find useful or interesting that you wouldn't want to lose should they be somehow wiped from the Internet.
the purpose of a project like this seems to be not just "here's some banned books" but rather "here's some banned books that I think are worth sharing / reading". if you think Mein Kampf belongs on that list, just say so directly.
> the purpose of a project like this seems to be not just "here's some banned books" but rather "here's some banned books that I think are worth sharing / reading"
Those aren’t banned books though. They are books that used to be banned in another century.
It’s like saying “I’m a criminal because I criticized the Pope”.
> Those aren’t banned books though. They are books that used to be banned in another century.
as has been covered in multiple comments elsewhere in the thread, the "banned" books that are checked-in to the repo are examples that were used because they're in the public domain.
Is Mein Kampf banned? It's currently in print and available from your friendly bookseller, in multiple editions spanning a couple translations and the original German. Of the two public library systems that cover my area, one has it (12 holds on 4 copies) and the other doesn't but does have other books by Hitler. I expect it's assigned reading in poli-sci classes.
You're advocating for including white supremacist and Nazi books. And you're not the only one in this thread doing it.
There is one reason someone would do that. You're a white supremacist and a Nazi. There's no in-between here. How about you fuck right off with all that? No tolerance for Nazis and racists.
Are there black, Asian, jewish supremacist, or zionist books that are banned? If so, which ones?
>There is one reason someone would do that. You're a white supremacist and a Nazi. There's no in-between here. How about you fuck right off with all that? No tolerance for Nazis and racists.
And good faith is straight out the window. Are you afraid because non-banned books and films told you they were bad, or because the people who produced those were afraid they were right and didn't want you to know that they were right?
You're advocating censorship. The good guys have not once in history ever needed to do that.
Nazis don't get good faith or the benefit of the doubt. I'm not censoring anyone, I am pointing out that you and other commenters here decided, apropos of nothing, to advocate for including racist and genocidal propaganda.
>Are you afraid because non-banned books and films told you they were bad, or because the people who produced those were afraid they were right and didn't want you to know that they were right?
How about you be more explicit, instead of hiding? You're saying shit like The Turner Diaries, a book that advocates for race war, white supremacy, and adoration of Hitler. You're saying the people who wrote those books might be right. You're saying the Nazis were right.
I know what you're doing, and you know what you're doing. As I said, fuck off with all that, no tolerance for the intolerant.
> what if the collection consisted of the following?
As the only books in it? Then it'd be best marketed as the "white supremacist conspiracy theorist starter kit". Throw in Mein Kampf while you're at it.
Just because a book is controversial doesn't make it good. No books should be banned, ever. But some books don't need promoting in a curated collection, either. They're useful for people doing literature research and understanding certain subcultures, but unlike the first list, they're not something useful and interesting to promote to a mass market, which makes them not good choices for a project like this.
Books are comparatively tiny, as data goes. If you have the space for a comprehensive list of every book in the public domain, by all means include those in it. But if you're making a curated list of a handful of books, and it's that list? That's certainly a choice.
I started reading the Camp of the Saints precisely because people said I shouldn’t. It was a bad book, I couldn’t read more than a few chapters. But I think adults should be able to read whatever they want.
The 'curated collection in a light bulb' in your strawman fallacy contains books you could find prominently displayed in every mainstream bookstore's entranceway. Hardly banned by any reasonable definition. Pilpul not withstanding.
The opposite of 'banned books' making it false advertising.
>for he or she is likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers.
Right everything is available freely unless you are a school student in which case you are a special class whom censorship can be practiced upon without any self reflection.
Its crazy I know, but maybe you are the one steeped in propaganda to the point where you have supported a bunch of anti speech, anti publishing laws, regulations and policies. And that, this lightbulb, such as it is, is designed specifically to avoid the censorship that you support?
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting ideological flamebait with a consistent flavor over several years. HN is for curious conversation, not this.
I chose books that were out of copyright, available from project Gutenberg, and had been banned or challenged in the USA at some point in the past to use as examples. There weren't many options. It's designed so the user can include whatever books are important to them wherever they may live. They may live somewhere more oppressive where banned books are a common occurrence. I have no idea. It wouldn't be wise to include copyrighted works in a public repository where I live.
In oppressive places a CCTV will detect you installing the bulb.
The mitigation here is to make it only turn on after 60 days. most places don't store cctv footage for more than a month, so if you have a dummy period, by the time it's noticed, the footage will be gone
Good point
Install it at night with gloves, wipe it to avoid fingerprints, and this hoodie https://hackaday.com/2023/03/06/adversarial-ir-hoodie-lets-y...
CCTVs operate in networks and use gait recognition, those hoodies are snake oil. You suggest to just teleport out after the installation, I presume?
Wouldn't you just need IR pants as well then?
Wheelchair yourself in and out.
I get it's a joke but in case someone thinks it'ss serious, unless you install it literally in the middle of nowhere with no CCTVs and also no one to connect to it, you will only stand out more in the crowd as you make your escape...
Put dollar store lamp with enabled lightbulb in backpack. Enter library. Scope out cameras. Find outlet in blind spot. Install lamp and bulb. Drop hints like qr sticky notes, or riddles like don't ban books, turn ur bulb on. WinRAR.
If you put something the oppressive regime really doesn't like, finding who went into the blind spot in the time that the lamp appeared is easily automated. Ingress & egress are covered. You may get lucky but you might be gambling your family on it too.
Freedom has a price, people outside the regime (refugees of the regime) could explain and pay friends outside of the oppressive regime, to sell them at a loss (below market rate).
People inside the oppressive regime will unwittingly buy smart bulbs, that only activate after enough were smuggled in at the same date, so that by the time the regime detects some, all bulbs will be traced to non-refugee sellers outside its jurisdiction, absolving any unwitting participants buying and powering them, so it's important the ad doesn't advertise any quirks or functionality added, as that would compromise the buyers.
By having the sellers be random foreigners (from the perspective of the oppressive regime), the regime can't punish the family of the refugees sponsoring this infiltration, if it doesn't know which refugee friends the seller has (so it should also be a low contact friend, so the refugee would have to convince a friend to do one large batch once, and never meet again..., which is a bit sad).
This assumes commercial entities aren't selling friend network data, or if they do, that oppressive regimes somehow can't get their hands on it. A rather dubious assumption in 2026...
To be fair, that could work. I almost wish your comment wasn't here to teach them and their llms;(
Nobody is doing "gait analysis" over this.
The FBI investigating a bombing? Yeah.
State cops investigating a murder? 50/50 odds?
Local cops investigating someone swapping out a fucking lightbulb? No.
FBI? US don't even have enough CCTVs in US probably for this to be an issue. rickooooooo is talking about somewhere "more oppressive". You go into enough detail on events of 1989 and they are absolutely doing it over that over there. And if you think they need to "do gait analysis", don't worry, it's automatic.
Ah shoot. Back to the drawing board I guess!
Right on. Hate to be a downer but for someone wanting to solve actual censorship this is not exactly the most productive way to direct their energy.
> The idea is that if you drop this somewhere in public, you can try to match whatever color was there before so it is less noticeable that anything changed.
I *love* this concept so much.
Even though the books are a neat hook, these wifi networks could contain anything.
Grassroots political advocacy, local info for off-the-grid historical sites, location specific micro-social media (comments, message boards, etc.), waymarkers, geocaching, hidden music / art / games in obscure places, ARGs like an interactive capture the flag or something even more inventive and fun, ...
God, this is just so freaking cool and is begging for a thousand different ideas to run on top of it.
Good job! One of the best things I've seen all year.
Thanks. I had several ideas for these bulbs as well. This is the one I decided to act on for now. I might work on some of the others later but I'm not sure. I agree there are so many potential uses for this sort of thing and I love how they just sort of exist without drawing attention or suspicion.
> It wouldn't be wise to include copyrighted works in a public repository where I live.
If you have a problem with storing illegal books in your "banned book library", you may be working on the wrong project.
As it stands it is a great example for others to learn from. If you include copyrighted books it’ll get pulled from GitHub and no one will learn from it.
You'd think this would be obvious.
> If you include copyrighted books it’ll get pulled from GitHub and no one will learn from it.
And how does that differ from including banned books?
It doesn’t? I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make.
This is not a database of banned books. It is an example showing how you can make a database of banned books of your own.
github nor the government github is subject to cares about those books, for either political or copyright reasons, that's how. Are there any other silly questions?
This is a perfectly sensible set of sample and example books. The project is the book distribution system, not the books themselves.
You load yours up with whatever you think is important or whatever you are willing to risk.
> likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers
all 4 of the books that are checked-in to that repo are old enough that they're in the public domain. I looked at Call of the Wild and it has a title page saying it came from Project Gutenberg, I assume the other 3 likely did too.
rather than jumping to conclusions about the author being influenced by a "psyop" I think there's a much simpler and more boring explanation - they didn't want to check copyrighted ebooks into a publicly-accessible Codeberg repo.
I chose these books as examples precisely because they are out of copyright and available on project Gutenberg. They also had been banned or challenged on the USA in the past. Project Gutenberg has a list of "banned books" on their own website and these are all included.
They appear to all be public domain. Even if they weren't, grandparent could've just called out that these are not really banned books instead of being pretentious with the "psyop" thing.
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Whether or not a psyop exists, it's presumptuous to say the author has fallen victim of it. Also suggests you're immune or something.
Also, the books on the bulb include Huckleberry Finn, which was removed from required reading in some Democrat-governed California cities because it uses racial slurs.
When should it be reported, then?
when it's banned by the federal government.
@dang You might want to check this username (put a space between the 5th and 6th letters if you're luckily not familiar with the term).
So if a book is banned by a widespread movement of extremists taking control of local governing bodies and the federal government is not involved, that's okay then?
I am absolutely dumbfounded that this seems to be ok to some people.
>there are no banned books in America.
that was the only point I was making. Mein Kraft, Selected Works of Lmao The Dong, and The Anarchist Cookbook may be removed from sale/access in some specific locations, but it is very much legal to buy, own, and sell them.
the US federal government historically banned books under the Comstock Act of 1873 which is still on the books and is still active federal law. it only currently isn't being enforced following some cultural changes in the 1960s. another change in the cultural winds could bring it back unfortunately
don't you have lots of those dormant old timey laws that would be promptly invalidated as unconstitutional if an attempt to enforce them was made these days, like sodomy laws were?
the Comstock act was unconstitutional at the time that it was actually enforced. i don't want to get into politics but there are many dynamic factors at work here
It's almost like this could be used in countries that aren't "America"
Your thought experiment asks: what if the banned book library contained out-of-print white supremacist books instead of historically banned books?
The answer should be obvious: it would be a white supremacist library.
Given that the present administration includes fans of those books, their banning seems unlikely. Perhaps a refresher on the kinds of books that are presently under threat is in order? https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
(You can find contemporary Huck Finn censorship attempts in their database here, by the way: https://airtable.com/appZthgrTU9u1Bf5d/shr4J8Mgiua2CV2Ig?mWW... )
Books that are assigned reading in schools and universities, and promoted by libraries, are "under threat", while books nearly impossible to find, never on any reading lists, and whose promoters get their speeches shut down by French police [1], or get investigated by the FBI and kicked out of university [2], are to be considered widely available, got it.
And your "historically banned" is just "occasionally removed from public school libraries on parental request". Not using tax money to promote them to children is a low, low bar for "banned". While actual availability is, of course, completely ignored. Whatever tells the best story, facts be damned.
[1] Jared Taylor's Banned Conference Speech - https://www.arktosjournal.com/p/jared-taylors-banned-confere...
[2] Ohio universities involve FBI in investigation of ‘It’s okay to be white’ and white nationalist group’s postings on campus - https://www.thefire.org/news/ohio-universities-involve-fbi-i...
We've decided collectively as a society that some ideas are "good" and others are "bad". For example, racism and white supremacy have been decided to be "bad".
There's an alternate reality where white supremacy is mainstream, where queer fiction is impossible to find, and that would be a different world.
Instead, what's being preserved are the books written that celebrate the values that match our broad cultural values, despite a handful of cultural deviants attempting to suppress the parts of the rest of humanity they dislike.
> that would be a different world
Yes, it's called "the past".
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"For once"?
That's a significant impugnment of the honesty of a person you know nothing about.
"Banned books" is the colloquial term for these books, even if it's not as accurate as you'd personally prefer.
Next thing you'll be complaining you bit into an Apple and got computer instead of fruit.
> "Banned books" is the colloquial term for these books
Yes, many people are either unaware of, or willing participants in, this lie. That doesn't make it any less of a lie.
It's not a lie. Some entity somewhere banned them. It's vague, not inaccurate.
You're just pissy because they aren't using your personal favorite parameters around "banned" for "by whom" and "for whom". You're pretending your opinion is fact and therefore anyone who disagrees must be a liar.
I'm curious of your take on one thing. Many of the sexuality oriented books (which your list is overwhelmingly composed of) tend to, unsurprisingly, have sexual content which is often rather explicit. Some of these books even have explicit artwork within them. I'm sure you'd agree that if books had ratings then many/all of these books would R, if not NC17, rated.
And even in high schools screening R-rated movies is generally heavily restricted. Where it is allowed, it generally requires a permission slip from the parents. And that's not like showing gratuitous films, but ones with historically relevant and educational context like e.g. Schindler's List.
So why is it unreasonable for parents (or other interested parties) to be against having such material in a children's library? In many ways its quite odd that a rating system was never adopted for books. And for one other question, do you even see a difference between these sort of books being restricted from schools, and other books whose content would be generally be rated appropriate for children, being banned on political/ideological basis? Because to me the difference is not only tremendous but the defining issue here.
> (which your list is overwhelmingly composed of
"My" list? I don't have a list. If you're talking about OP's list, I disagree with that. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are not sexual books. From what I know of many of the other more recent books people have tried to ban, I absolutely would not agree the ratings would be R/NC17 for those either. Here's a list of PG13 (And PG!) movies with nudity. https://www.imdb.com/list/ls548607223/
I agree that 7 year olds should not be shown sexual content. There exists content with sexual themes which are appropriate for teenagers.
Also, the comment you replied to is downthread in an argument over whether it's a "lie" to call books that someone banned, a banned book.
I was referencing the one you were implicitly defending that started this line of chatter: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10 Most of the books from that list are widely available and easily accessible. The 'under threat' rhetoric is just from them being removed from some schools due to content being deemed age inappropriate. Those pg13 movies with nudity tend to be things like a few seconds of sideboob in a shower or whatever.
The top book on that 'challenged' list is a diary style book of a 13 year old girl who is sold into sex slavery, repeatedly raped, abused, and so on - with descriptions of each 'encounter.' The book is meant to be, and indeed is, extremely disturbing as it's part of the author's activism against sex trafficking throughout the world - as it was based on real events as per her research. In any case, it most certainly is not PG13 by any stretch of the imagination. It's much closer to something like Requiem for a Dream than it is to Tomb Raider.
I also think that's a great book to have on top, because it emphasizes that the issue isn't ideological, but content. I think there's few people who would claim Sold doesn't have tremendous value, or that it should be banned. But there's going to be a lot of people that don't want books like that anywhere near children. And for good reason - it's the same reason I wouldn't really care if my kids wanted to watch Total Recall or Terminator, but no way would I let them watch Requiem for a Dream. The violence and triple titted aliens of Total Recall are borderline comical, but I don't think stuff that gives you that awful 'ughhhh' feeling like Requiem for a Dream (or indeed - Sold) is something that's going to be at all healthy for a child's development.
"Formerly banned books" would be more accurate.
We no longer say that "cannabis is illegal in California"; that would be factually incorrect. Instead we say, "cannabis was formerly illegal". In standard usage of English, the same pattern applies to banned vs formerly banned books.
Edit: wording
> It's not a lie.
It deliberately conveys an impression that is opposite of the truth. But feel free to continue to split hairs and twist words to argue that technically you're not actually lying.
> deliberately conveys
Just because you decided to interpret something one way, doesn't mean it was a deliberate choice by the other party, nor does it mean your interpretation is common.
> technically you're not actually lying.
What did I say that you consider a lie? Could you quote me?
By God's, these are examples, artifacts for the repository you can use yourself.
What's so triggering in using, as examples, books that were once banned?
It's getting weird seeing how you're going on and on and on about that aftee the author has explained why these books.
Why do you want people to read those books so bad?
It's convenient that only evil people point out the emperor has no clothes, isn't it?
Reminds me of the "banned book" table every book store has now. The place where so called banned books are given the most prominent display in the whole store with discounts if you buy a novelty pencil or something alongside it.
I thought we would all be over this after the dr seuss thing.
Yes, I studied 'D.H.Lawrence's Women in Love' in college, yet I could not believe it when I saw its NSFW scenes played on all tv screens in a train in Ukraine in 1990, one passenger, a very old lady was loud and raucous and started shouting things that made everyone in the train laugh, I asked a Russian friend what she was saying and he said that she was blaming everyone why missed all those lovely tv shows with such things and had not watched anything as good when she was young. I think she meant that scene in page 246 if I recall it right from reading it in 1983.
Don’t “necessarily agree” with the Turner Diaries? Why the mystery? Should we guess?
>- The Camp of the Saints
>- Culture of Critique
>- The Turner Diaries
Actual banned books. So of course your comment is flagged. Groupthink censorship is still censorship.
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Thank you for this!
It's been a while since I used the github gist 'download zip' functionality. Quite handy.
Doesn't understand the stunningly simple and obvious concept of a safe sample placeholder example, presumes to question anyone else's grip on reality.
> Note that I don't necessarily agree with the subject matter of these titles
Y'know, there's really only one reason to be coy about whether you agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda.
>Y'know, there's really only one reason to be coy about whether you agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda.
Straight to the ad hominem attack on taboo thoughts. Transparent. If the books are true what is your problem with them? Not me. Not the other poster. Not a strawman fallacy. What is your issue with the content of actually banned books? Be specific.
Someone named tinfoilhatter replied but that's gone now. Not one to let a response go to waste:
Well. I seem to have triggered something.
> Ah yes, because the only people that have ever spread propaganda are Neo-Nazis
Not something I ever said or implied.
> and we should only ever learn about the sanitized and approved version of history from our Robert Maxwell (Ghislane Maxwell's Mossad agent father / McGraw Hill co-founder) published textbooks.
I find it interesting who just happens to know who else is Jewish, and then feels the need to interject that into utterly irrelevant contexts.
> Never mind that there are two sides to every story, and when it comes to history, only the victors get to tell theirs.
No, I'm pretty sure a lot of losers have been able to have their sides heard. It's just that, well, people lose for a reason, and losers tend to be less popular among normal people. Ranting about subhumans can do that, you know.
> We don't even learn about the 23+ million massacred by the Bolsheviks in school.
I would be interested to know who exactly you call a Bolshevik, but I did get taught the history of the USSR in school, at least, and "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" is not a ringing endorsement.
However, nobody was talking about Bolsheviks until you decided to use them as a distraction.
> But yeah - only one reason to consider a different perspective other than the one forced down your throat by the public education system.
I didn't need the public education system to teach me to hate genocidal racists, thank you.
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> No but you said there was only a single reason to agree with "Neo-Nazi" propaganda as if agreeing with any propaganda is rational. There's a reason it's called propaganda after all. It's not like there weren't deplorable crimes being committed by the Soviets / US / France / Britain and they certainly had their fair share of propaganda during WWI and WWII depicting Germans as barbarians / sub-human / etc...
We're only talking about one political group here. The group that published The Turner Diaries. The group that can't help but mention who's Jewish. Bringing up other groups is a distraction tactic, aside from how dishonest it is. Yes, we are taught that everyone did morally questionable things in WWII. But only one group ran a Dachau.
> How is the owner of the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US, and the fact that he served in a Zionist intelligence organization in the US, irrelevant when it comes to what people learn about WWII and propaganda? Please explain.
OK, let's get down to brass tacks: Do you think people only believe the Holocaust happened and was bad because a Jewish man published a lot of textbooks?
> Are you disputing the well-recorded fact that tens of millions of innocents were killed by the Bolsheviks over the span of about 40 years?
Are you disputing the fact eleven million people were killed by a concerted effort on the part of Nazi Germany to eliminate people it considered subhuman for various reasons?
I don't dispute the vile stain on the history of state Communism. I hate Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Hoxha and Kim Il-Sung just as much as the next normal person. But we're talking about why someone wouldn't distribute The Turner Diaries and, I have to say, the Communists didn't commit that little literary peccadillo.
> Why don't we learn about the Holodomor in the US in grade school?
Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.
> I never said you did - but if it were me, I'd want to make sure I considered both sides of a historical event before deciding which direction to aim my hatred, if I was into such endeavors.
That's funny, the more I learn about WWII the less I feel the Nazis had a legitimate side. They were a bunch of losers lead around by a drugged-up corporal who ran his country into the ground with gross mismanagement to the point Germany, once the jewel of European science and industry, was split in half and lived a shadow existence as the puppet of two world powers for a half century after his reign.
> I personally believe that war is a racket, and that there are no good guys in evil and corrupt wars (WWII was definitely one of those, same with WWI).
The corruption in WWII was the starting of it, which falls directly at the feet of the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Self-defense is not corruption, and neither is ending the reign of expansionist tyrants. Or do you think people don't have the right to defend themselves from your pet dictators?
> I'm also not naive enough to believe that there wasn't atrocious behavior on both sides of either war.
Only one side ran death camps. Both sides imprisoned people unjustly, but only one side turned them into ashes. It doesn't balance out.
> Nor am I going to label anyone who has the gall to question the prevailing narrative or say it is incorrect in some capacity, a Neo-Nazi.
No, the only people I call Neo-Nazis are the ones triggered when I say the Nazis were, on the whole, bad for everyone around them.
> only one group ran a Dachau
is a strange example since it was just a complex of work camps, with the Japanese, British and so on having far worse than that.
> Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.
The hyperbole weakens the point / or where are you to see constant Nazis? In the US, Mexico and Germany I regularly see hammer and sickle flags, t-shirts and graffiti. In Mexico city right now, there are huge banners with Stalin and Lenin, besides Marx and Engels, draped across traffic lights and streets all over the center, while it's been almost 10 years since the only big nazi protest I'm aware of (Charlottesville)
As if Neo-Nazis were and are the only people capable of authoring propaganda. The Bolsheviks certainly were good at it, yet we don't learn about the 23+ million they massacred in US schools. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US (McGraw Hill) was co-founded by Ghislane Maxwell's Mossad agent father Robert? One can and should question the prevailing narrative when it comes to historical record. After all, the victors get to write it, and there are two sides to every story. You don't have to agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda to acknowledge that what we are taught about WWII and Weimar Germany in school, isn't the truth either.
> The Bolsheviks certainly were good at it, yet we don't learn about the 23+ million they massacred in US schools.
Those of us who paid attention certainly did.
How can you pay attention, as a student, to a historical event that isn't being taught to you in your history class? Please explain.
Less than 8% of the English speaking world has heard of the Bolsheviks' genocide. And we know that's not an accident because Mossad's Robert Maxwell owned the dominant textbook publishing company in America for years.
If that simple, easily checkable fact doesn't get your hackles up I would know why that it doesn't.
> As if Neo-Nazis were and are the only people capable of authoring propaganda
Of course they aren't. But that's no argument for distributing it.
No, the argument for distributing it would be that other propaganda is widely distributed without question, so if one wants to arrive at anything even close to an objective account of what transpired during that time in history, all propaganda should be examined and learned about. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle, and we certainly aren't getting to it by blindly accepting one narrative over another.
No, because extremist propaganda does not "average out" to an objective center.
If you want to distribute it in a box labeled "extremist propaganda", to study it as such, sure.
But if your society has some extremist propaganda in the wild, distributing more, different extremist propaganda will make things strictly worse.
Who defines what is extremist propaganda? The people who win the propaganda war and get to label the other side as extremists is the answer.
Extremism can be more-or-less objectively defined in terms of difference from the mean/median. Measurement is tricky but just because something has fuzzy boundaries doesn't mean it's meaningless. Especially when something is not near that fuzzy boundary.
> You don't have to agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda to acknowledge that what we are taught about WWII and Weimar Germany in school, isn't the truth either.
Go on then.
Say what you mean.
I just said what I meant - what we are taught about WWII and Weimar Germany in school isn't anything approaching the truth. For example: https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-massa...
I don’t know what school you went to, but mine covered war crimes committed by the Allies plenty.
That doesn’t mean Nazi Germany wasn’t utterly disgusting though.
Both sides in the war were utterly disgusting. The allies firebombed cities full of innocent German civilians, and when the civilians would seek refuge in the only remaining buildings standing, the allies would bomb those. The soviets killed between 1.6 and 15 million in their gulag camp system, not to mention the millions they massacred, tortured, mutilated, etc... in Russia and on their march westward. We certainly learned a lot more about the war crimes Germany allegedly committed than the ones the allies allegedly did, and we certainly didn't learn about war crimes that were committed by the Soviets but blamed on the Germans. I went to school in the US.
Thank you for pointing this out. That list of “banned books” (that were unbanned long ago, and are now considered great literature) indeed seems more like virtue signaling.
There are equivalent books in our own time, and using those instead would make the project feel more like an actual defense of Free Speech and less like a quip of “goodness gracious, people were prudes in the 1920s”, which everyone already agrees with.
These are just examples I could legally include in a public github repository to demonstrate the functionality. The alternative would be to include copyrighted works or nothing. The user is free to include any books that are important to them.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, "books in our own time" tend to still be under copyright and might not survive long in a public code repository.
There is at least one “banned” book, written by a former dictator, whose copyright expired in 2015, 70 years after his death in 1945.
But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.
A major element of "Freedom of Speech" is the freedom to not support or repeat or platform speech you disagree with.
OP is not even slightly wrong to leave out texts they disagree with. Theres no hypocrisy here. They have the Freedom to not publish works.
> But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.
putting hypothetical words in other peoples' mouths like this seems like it must be a pretty exhausting way to try to make a point.
quoting from the article:
> I think the idea hosting banned books specifically came to me after having read Ben Brown's short story Library. It's been a while since I read it, but if I recall there are characters in the story who maintain a "library" which acts as a digital archive of creative works, owners manuals, 3d models, etc. Things that others might find useful or interesting that you wouldn't want to lose should they be somehow wiped from the Internet.
the purpose of a project like this seems to be not just "here's some banned books" but rather "here's some banned books that I think are worth sharing / reading". if you think Mein Kampf belongs on that list, just say so directly.
but also the premise of your comment is wrong, because Mein Kampf is not banned at all: https://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler-ebook/dp/B002...
> the purpose of a project like this seems to be not just "here's some banned books" but rather "here's some banned books that I think are worth sharing / reading"
Those aren’t banned books though. They are books that used to be banned in another century.
It’s like saying “I’m a criminal because I criticized the Pope”.
> Those aren’t banned books though. They are books that used to be banned in another century.
as has been covered in multiple comments elsewhere in the thread, the "banned" books that are checked-in to the repo are examples that were used because they're in the public domain.
Is Mein Kampf banned? It's currently in print and available from your friendly bookseller, in multiple editions spanning a couple translations and the original German. Of the two public library systems that cover my area, one has it (12 holds on 4 copies) and the other doesn't but does have other books by Hitler. I expect it's assigned reading in poli-sci classes.
You're advocating for including white supremacist and Nazi books. And you're not the only one in this thread doing it.
There is one reason someone would do that. You're a white supremacist and a Nazi. There's no in-between here. How about you fuck right off with all that? No tolerance for Nazis and racists.
Are there black, Asian, jewish supremacist, or zionist books that are banned? If so, which ones?
>There is one reason someone would do that. You're a white supremacist and a Nazi. There's no in-between here. How about you fuck right off with all that? No tolerance for Nazis and racists.
And good faith is straight out the window. Are you afraid because non-banned books and films told you they were bad, or because the people who produced those were afraid they were right and didn't want you to know that they were right?
You're advocating censorship. The good guys have not once in history ever needed to do that.
Nazis don't get good faith or the benefit of the doubt. I'm not censoring anyone, I am pointing out that you and other commenters here decided, apropos of nothing, to advocate for including racist and genocidal propaganda.
>Are you afraid because non-banned books and films told you they were bad, or because the people who produced those were afraid they were right and didn't want you to know that they were right?
How about you be more explicit, instead of hiding? You're saying shit like The Turner Diaries, a book that advocates for race war, white supremacy, and adoration of Hitler. You're saying the people who wrote those books might be right. You're saying the Nazis were right.
I know what you're doing, and you know what you're doing. As I said, fuck off with all that, no tolerance for the intolerant.
> what if the collection consisted of the following?
As the only books in it? Then it'd be best marketed as the "white supremacist conspiracy theorist starter kit". Throw in Mein Kampf while you're at it.
Just because a book is controversial doesn't make it good. No books should be banned, ever. But some books don't need promoting in a curated collection, either. They're useful for people doing literature research and understanding certain subcultures, but unlike the first list, they're not something useful and interesting to promote to a mass market, which makes them not good choices for a project like this.
Books are comparatively tiny, as data goes. If you have the space for a comprehensive list of every book in the public domain, by all means include those in it. But if you're making a curated list of a handful of books, and it's that list? That's certainly a choice.
See also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549512
I started reading the Camp of the Saints precisely because people said I shouldn’t. It was a bad book, I couldn’t read more than a few chapters. But I think adults should be able to read whatever they want.
You are free to read whatever you want. Doesn't mean it should be part of a curated collection in a light bulb
The 'curated collection in a light bulb' in your strawman fallacy contains books you could find prominently displayed in every mainstream bookstore's entranceway. Hardly banned by any reasonable definition. Pilpul not withstanding.
The opposite of 'banned books' making it false advertising.
The Wikipedia page doesn't say anything about this book being "banned" or "censored"...
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It won't surprise most people here that this guy's past comments have a real weird focus on race!
>for he or she is likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers.
Right everything is available freely unless you are a school student in which case you are a special class whom censorship can be practiced upon without any self reflection.
Its crazy I know, but maybe you are the one steeped in propaganda to the point where you have supported a bunch of anti speech, anti publishing laws, regulations and policies. And that, this lightbulb, such as it is, is designed specifically to avoid the censorship that you support?