listening to an NPR segment discussing “Gender Queer” as a “banned book”, i looked up “Gender Queer” on Amazon, and it was there, available to purchase. i looked up “Turner Diaries”, and it was not.
“Gender Queer” is, I am sure, “banned” from many schools and public libraries (which also, I suspect, don’t carry “Turner Diaries”).
should we be outraged by the suppression (“banning”) of “Turner Diaries” too, or are we arguing more about the criteria of suppression than the fact thereof?
@interfluidity The difference is that it's government entities banning these books from government-run schools and libraries.
Amazon is a private company, with every right to choose what it sells.
I'd argue that both books should be allowed in (appropriately aged) school libraries, and both books should be in special sections that add context so kids don't take them out without having some kind of idea of what they're getting themselves into. That would be good education.
@LouisIngenthron I think that's principled enough, as long as you acknowledge — which you do — that the *status quo* then is government suppression of Turner Diaries that should be remedied by its inclusion in age-appropriate, well-contextualized government provided sources of books. (Obviously that is not the case right now, so you are arguing for more affirmative government action to undo its current suppression of bad speech.)
@interfluidity If your premise is accurate, then yes. The government should not be making content-based restrictions.
But, as I mentioned in a different post, I don't entirely buy that the Turner Diaries are "suppressed", not until I see evidence that it was removed for ideological reasons.
@LouisIngenthron Again, we're not disagreeing in principle. We both agree that it's legit for libraries to make choices on the basis of some nonideological mix of popularity, notability, value-as-a-reference, etc.
I'd put to you, though, that the fact that I could bring up the Turner Diaries and pretty much all of my interlocutors know what I am talking about suggests that it meets a notability threshold that, absent other concerns, would be sufficient for many libraries to carry it.
@interfluidity I'm not too proud to admit that I had to google it to participate in this conversation.
@LouisIngenthron Ha! Maybe less notable than I think!
Sometime in the 1990s I actually read the Turner Diaries, as an old-school physical book. I remember getting challenged in a cafe in Cambridge MA, angrily asked "What are you reading?" I'm like, hey, I'm a rootless cosmopolitan Jew but some motherfucker just blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City and I want to understand WTF they are on about.