Love the nice detail about making sure the kids who are reading books at the library have to return them in case they are suddenly porn.
I think the bookshelf in my Montessori elementary school (4th-6th grades) had Clan of the Cave Bear.
This is clearly not going to disqualify DeSantis. It's his among his qualifications.
It's not going to endear him to the general masses.
Right, but it's his qualification to get the nomination. Once he gets the nomination, no matter how much he pisses off the masses, he's got a real shot.
I was at the ALA last summer and did not get a sense of urgency from the higher ups in the org though I did get it from fellow librarians there. I was very disappointed. There should be organizing and legal challenges all over this shit.
Also I'm going to disagree with ajay in the other thread. Florida is a very weird state. Maybe the weirdest. Too flat. Too swampy. Too many alligators. The weirdness is baked in.
I just took a look at the polls to see if DeSantis's post-midterm boost has persisted - FiveThirtyEight lets you download their poll aggregations in CSV format now.
Short answer, yes, but not clearly enough to win the primary. In head-to-head matchups, Trump went from averaging +15 before the election to -6 after, although he's recovering slowly (November -9, December -4, January -3). But in polls with those two and anyone else, he went from +30 to +13. So if it stays like this, Trump is likely to keep winning states by the winner-take-all method, because once again his opposition is incapable of uniting. (Not that being a Republican opposed to Trump gives you any particular common principles, since some are trying to outdo Trump.)
What I'd love to know is whether what DeSantis is doing right now is popular with parents in Florida. It seems like the sort of thing that should cause a backlash, but who knows anymore?
I doubt it's popular with parents. I think his base is The Villages.
DeSantis could absolutely win the NH primary. Republicans here just love his whole shtick.
It doesn't matter if it's popular with parents. The parents with whom it is popular will be happy enough to vote for DeSantis because of this. The other parents were mostly never going to vote for a Democrat regardless or don't care about public schools because they can buy their way out of problems.
DeSantis won by enough that his popularity among Florida voters (who made it to the polls) seems real even when you factor in all the ways Republicans tried to make it hard to vote. Maybe not every stunt is popular or even legal but people overlook a lot if the overall end result is what they want, and it's apparently not possible for elected and appointed Republicans, and their well off backers, to break laws in any ways that result in more than some dollars changing hands and the occasional pardon slapped on a wrist.
It's striking that the local news report in the OP link was apparently not able to find anyone to quote in support of the law. Lots of critical quotes from parents, then a perfunctory line at the end that basically amounts to "supporters of the law say it's good."
The Right-Wing blogs I check in on occasionally love DeSantis because he's making laws that hurt trans people, which is their current moral panic.
My kid says he loves having his existence made into a talking point.
My impression was that a lot of DeSantis's popularity is about covid. I think it's a lot less clear that his stunts that he's up to now are popular. But being against school closures and masks were very popular positions.
but I really think DeSantis does not have a prayer.
That's what I've been saying. Lots of candidates poll well right up until they enter the race, and I think DeSantis has a particular problem in this regard, because at some point, he'll need to run against Trump. A lot of DeSantis' popularity is pegged to the fact that he's a Trump acolyte.
The Republican rank-and-file wants an insult comic (read: wants to pwn the libs). The other potential candidates have learned from Trump -- shipping immigrants to Kamala Harris was an inspired bit of trollery -- but anything they can do, Trump can do better. The DeSantis boosters describe him as like Trump, but a serious figure. I think that counts against him.
The law may yet catch up with Trump, and he's an old guy who may be stricken one way or another, but I'm not even persuaded that DeSantis is the likeliest of alternatives.
An organization called Ohio Value Voters sent an organizer into our suburb to stir up trouble about CRT and other topics being taught in the public school. There was a lot of yelling at school board meetings.
The thing that struck me was how few of the conservatives complaining about what was going on in the schools actually had children in the school. Many sent their kids to the white-flight private schools in the area. Several talked about having grandchildren in the schools. One grandad told the board meeting that he was telling his grandchildren not to go to college, because he had learned that all college does these days is corrupt children. I wondered if his kids were doing anything to block this message from being passed on to the grandkids.
In any case, we organized opposition and swept the school board races, and Ohio Value Voters went packing. They did better in the neighboring suburb, though. Public opinion had been poisoned against the school because a teacher had been taking upskirt photos of HS students and other teachers knew and said nothing.
Re: ajay's point in the other thread, the sunshine laws are absolutely a factor in the spread of "Florida man" stories of wacky crimes. That said, I left the state as soon as I could, even though there are a (very) few things I still miss about living there.
It's not like it's a new law. If they didn't like the stories, they would have fixed the law.
They appear to have reinforced the public access to records laws multiple times over the century, including via constitutional amendment.
Police records of course have to be written, but I never hear about wacky official meetings revealed by the law. I wonder if everything that can be done by voice without written records, now is in Florida.
Because analogies are banned, I won't make one directly. But if your zipper bursts open and your wang falls out at the mall once, it's probably an accident. If it happens often enough that morning drive-time radio makes a segment about it, it's probably not an accident.
My middle school library had the whole Flowers in the Attic series, and I read them all. But I was embarrassed to be reading them because I realized how trashy and melodramatic and inappropriate they were, so I didn't ever check any out, I just read them whenever my class was scheduled to go the library. I think the librarian knew what was up but she liked me so she pretended not to.
Wait, it was a series? How many were there?
But it looks like some of those are too recent for any of us to have seen in middle school.
Anyway, I didn't read them and our school certainly didn't have them in the library, but I remember at least one of the girls reading it. We all knew it was about incest, but the full plot was not something I knew.
My friends bought me the whole series for my eleventh birthday. All the girls in sixth grade were obsessed with them. A few years ago I tried to explain the plot of My Sweet Audrina (a standalone, not part of the FITA series) and it was so convoluted I had to go to Wikipedia to untangle my memory of the plot -- and it turned out that it's actually so much more bananas than I even remembered. VC Andrews really had an untrammeled imagination.
I don't think my elementary school library carried much gothic incest romance (which is why we had to trick our parents into buying it for our friends' birthdays), but I remember reading a lot of true crime and Ripley's Believe It Or Not. In high school, my hippie English teacher let us borrow whatever we wanted from her classroom, so I read Das Energi and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and a lot of Ram Dass. DeSantis would probably be opposed to those as well, but maybe he would have a point. I don't remember much of those books anyway; turns out VC Andrews has a lot more staying power.
26, 31: I think I'd heard the name but I knew no details about "Flowers in the Attic" - I think I may have been confusing it vaguely with "Flowers for Algernon" - so I just looked it up now, and bloody hell. Still, now I think I understand why "Twilight" was such a success.
And I note to my horror that it's popular over here too - it appeared on the BBC's poll of "200 Favourite Books" (albeit at number 200).
The only age-inappropriate books on the "A" shelf of my school library were by Piers Anthony.
re: 32
Oh yeah. Girls at my high school were obsessed by it in the early to mid 80s. I think more or less around the typical US middle school age group.
The Atlantic has a piece with the headline "Florida has a right to destroy its universities." I'm not going to read it, but I think the DeSantis is knowingly damaging the long term future of his state for short-term political advantages and there's really nothing to do about it except point to the example when trying to elect Democrats in other states.
Unfogged book club candidate! Pretty much everyone in the family outside the main siblings is hilariously appalling, Flannery OConnor characters.
37: His voters will all be dead, so they don't care about the future.
Why is it that boomers care so little about leaving a future to their kids and grandkids? I feel like this is a genuinely weird development and not a normal part of aging.
I feel like moving to Florida to be surrounded only by people of your own age and social class while consuming right wing propaganda isn't healthy.
The 2018 Florida governor's race still puzzles the heck out of me. Eleven years as a city councilman followed by four years as mayor of the state's capital city, and nobody noticed he was bi? The corruption charges mentioned in Gillum's wikipedia entry also sound an awful lot like a power structure trying to set up a Black man. And yet the race was extremely close! That's just gone down the memory hole entirely. What the heck?
39.2 US culture has revolved around the Boomers for basically their entire lives. Is it any wonder that, collectively, they are solipsistic and entitled?
I recently saw a Twitter poll on the question of the most-ignored generation. The choices: Silent, Boomer, Millennial, Gen Z.
39..2 Boomers were fed a constant diet of "They'll invent a technology to fix the downside", and until the last quarter of a century it seemed plausible. It's a big ask for people to reject the assumptions they've built their lives on when they're over 40. Most who could or who weren't fooled in the first place are on Unfogged. Growing in les trentes glorieuses did weird things to your understanding of the world.
The Boomers have gotten old, and old people are horrible.
Oddly enough the boomers in my family have aged well in terms of political views (maybe it's a Jewish thing) while my wife's have gone off the deep end (WASPs)
45 is insightful, thanks. I hadn't connected median-person technological optimism with the postwar boom, but that's right.
Yeah, that's a really good point that explains a lot.
I don't buy 45 at all! Sorry! The biggest bogeymen of the 70s and 80s were things like crime in the cities, AIDS, women's lib, and inflation. None of those are relevant to being fed a story where technology will solve everything.
The problem is that fear is addictive and there are a lot of boomers who are pretty credulous and dumb, and Fox News, the Russians, plus less successful grifters making hay of the situation. Florida is just the setting.
They're not thinking of their grandkids' libraries because their limbic system is swamped with bigger fears about Democrats destroying the country. Literally.
I went to a meeting. We're actuality not trying to do that.
Ok, but the guy on the news seemed very stern on the matter.
45 is interesting but fails to account for the fact that people's voting patterns often (have always) tend(ed) to become more conservative as they age. This is not a new phenomenon. That said, the Boomers do seem to be unusually awful. I suspect what accounts for that is the size of the cohort: they have more power than they should in too many ways to count. In other words, they're aging the way most people age, but there are A LOT of them.
Shorter: what we're identifying as a cohort issue is actually an age issue, just magnified by scale.
50. ? AIDS and post- embargo infaltion were both basically solved by technology-- not immediately, but solved.
Does aging leading to conservatism also happen in societies less commited to optimism as an ideology? Genuinely curious, will see if I can start a conversation along these lines with non-european/US friends.
56.2: The most famous expression of that trope is from an English politician.
He was conservative by the standards of his time, but too firmly against Nazism to count today.
55: ageing x cohort size x having always gotten your way because of your cohort size. So it's cubic.
56: They were, but they manifested as fear/animosity of gay people and allegiance to Reagan. Neither were perceived through a lens of Tomorrowland Optimism about a Technology Enhanced Future.
It was a difficult time, but it really set the stage for The Ambiguously Gay Duo to premier in the next decade.
Surely part of the problem is that 'conservatism' here means 'buying whatever message bill the Republicans are selling." It's not like the Boomers are changing their mind on the fundamentals of market economics. They're just annoyed that the kids have rainbow hair and apparently all trans from the critical race theory from what their media tells them. So they're getting more conservative like cohorts do, but they're doing so when MAGA is what conservatism is.
57. Good point. He expected the British Empire to last forever, but that's food for thought, definitely not everything happens for a reason by your bootstraps flavor of optimism.
Millennials are getting less conservative as they age.
They're also still getting taller in their 30s. They will tower over us all.
Here's some Florida weirdness for you that has nothing to do with sunshine laws: https://twitter.com/desantiswarroom/status/1620816058310610946?s=46&t=gn3kGklQJ10IbjhhC6Uq4Q
62 Yeah, I think these things are more about revenge for rejection than any sort of natural trend to conservatism. The Silents foisted prop 13 and Reagan as revenge for Boomers' Vietnam protests etc.
66 It's really impressive how they have nothing at all besides oppositional defiance.
Apparently, Florida is the state with the lowest use of gas stoves. I would bet the the economics of running gas lines are very different when "cold snap" means "lower 40s."
Florida is also not close to any significant gas deposits. It's one of the least gas-oriented states in general. DeSantis's posturing is extremely stupid in context.
Pennsylvania is very gas oriented. We even have a new cracker factory to take advantage of having so much gas.
I have never seen a gas stove in FL (I'm not sure I even really knew what they were until I studied abroad and had to deal with a dorm kitchen stove that needed to be lit with a match). Or a basement.
Moving north was a pretty big shock, especially when I learned that people actually swam in fresh water lakes and rivers without worrying about alligators or poisonous snakes. AIMHMHB the first time I saw snow fall I was 19, and genuinely shocked that snowflakes weren't the size of a dinner plate, as that's how big they are when you cut them out of paper. (I thought that "snow flakes" were a special subset of "snow." This is what happens when you only take 3 sciences in HS, and the chem teacher is having an affair with the physics teacher--neither of whom taught you anything except the "Mole Day" song celebrating 10/23 from 6:02 am to 6:02 pm--and you know a lot about the humanities and social sciences for a teenager but the only natural science stuff you know and care about has to do with the Florida coastline and other stuff you learned at Junior Ranger Camp.)
I believe this was the song from 1997:
6.022 times 10 to the 23rd
C'mon and shout it!
You don't have to be a geek or some kind of nerd
To know about it!
It's no mystery.
Just a bit of chemistry.
When you've got that many of a thing,
You've got a mole!
I'm fairly certain that my high school science classes actually left me understanding less about science. Pre- and post-tests demonstrated that to be the case for physics, at least.
chem teacher is having an affair with the physics teacher
Hott.
Moles were my favorite part of chemistry. It's just a neat concept.
My physics teacher was the and person as my chemistry teacher. He also taught religion. This isn't a complaint. He was a very good teacher.
He's also, according to Facebook, a raving nutburger these days.
We even have a new cracker factory
Please stop making crackers, they're destroying the country.
The factory doesn't make crackers. It makes plastics out of natural gas. I didn't name it.
I have never seen a gas stove in FL (I'm not sure I even really knew what they were until I studied abroad and had to deal with a dorm kitchen stove that needed to be lit with a match). Or a basement.
FWIW, my parents have a gas stove.
I've never even seen a gas-powered violin.
Yo-yo Ma got booed at Woodstock when he played a gas cello.
There were definitely no basements, let alone any gas-powered ones. Actually there are very few basements in this part of Texas, but for different reasons. In Florida, it's because the water table is too high. Here, it's because the rock is too hard. Fewer backyard pools here than in Florida. Thank you all for reading.
In Texas, you can put the pool in the front yard.
I've only used a single-burner induction cooktop but I think I'd prefer a full induction stove to the electric stoves I've used before. But I don't have a huge amount of cookware to replace to work with induction.
We haven't yet gotten to induction in my proofs course.
Dylan got booed at the Newport Folk Festival when he played an electric guitar. Back then the lefties were all about the gas.
Woodstock, Newport. More or less the same thing.
How many flames must a man ignite
Before you can call him a man
The answer my friend
Is turning on the knobs
The answer is turning on the knobs
Dylan or Yo-Yo Ma
Guitar or Cello
To Moby
So High Above-
All the Same.
90. Dylan got booed in the UK because the Communist Party (membership less than ten thousand and declining at the time) had an official line that folk music was good proletarian art but rock was degenerate. So they sent a group of trusted cadres chasing round the country to buy tickets for Dylan's concerts, shout abuse at him and walk out. This came out later, after the Party had ceased to exist.
Rock lovers who were inclined to the far left became Trots or anarchists. John Lennon briefly toyed with Trotskyism before deciding he preferred whatever you'd describe Yoko as being.
Surprising that Communism never really caught on in the west.
94: I'm assuming this was not at Newport specifically.
It seems like booing Dylan ought to have been a really effective way to mobilize the proletariat. Were they not booing loud enough?
Menthol cigarettes and acoustic rock are a solid pair.
John Lennon briefly toyed with Trotskyism before deciding he preferred whatever you'd describe Yoko as being.
Is that why he seemed to have a hard time deciding if he wanted to be counted in or out?
Gather 'round children it's high time ye learn
About a fuel called gas and a stovetop that burns