▪️This is an incredible story. In the past year there have been countless memes shrieking about “book bans” in red states, which are typically a single school board deciding a few books are not age appropriate, often moving them from the elementary to middle school section or similar action. Now, Ontario schools are removing giant swaths of books, as much as 50%, for equity initiatives!
▪️The school board describes this as simply a “weeding process” (book bans only apply to conservatives). The board said, "Books published prior to 2008 that are damaged, inaccurate, or do not have strong circulation data (are not being checked out by students) are removed”
▪️This follows Directive 18 from Ontario’s Ministry of Education, which tells school boards “to complete a diversity audit of schools, which includes libraries.” This instructs librarians to “review” books published before 2008 based on the MUSTIE acronym:
🔹Misleading- information may be factually inaccurate or obsolete
🔹Unpleasant– refers to the physical condition, not content, of the book
🔹Superseded– book been overtaken by a new edition or a more current resource
🔹Trivial– no discernible literary or scientific merit
🔹 Irrelevant– doesn't meet the needs and interests of the library's community
🔹Elsewhere– the material in it may be better obtained from other sources
▪️With the exception of unpleasant and superseded, this standard is HIGHLY subjective, essentially giving librarians the power to determine what is misleading and relevant!
▪️It gets worse, of course. Step 2 of curation is “an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity."”
▪️And step 3 is “a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.” What could possibly go wrong with that?
▪️The absolute kicker is this quote:
🔹 “When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate." For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."”
▪️So while not literally burning books, they are destroying them. This includes such dissident works as the Hungry Caterpillar and Anne Frank’s diary. Imagine, for a moment, the reaction if this was happening in a conservative school district.
▪️There is thankfully some pushback on this from, presumably, left wing people in Canada. But it’s based on worries that older books about Japanese internment camps or the Holocaust might be removed. Not revulsion over the equity “weeding process” itself.
▪️While this is in Canada, there is no real ideological difference between Ontario’s equity initiative for books and progressive areas in the US. This would be championed by the left in the US if they could get away with it, which tells you everything you need to know about the “book ban” hysteria.
Full story here:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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