!nanowrimo@literature.cafe is the community, if you plan on participating in the challenge feel free to post over there about it :D

we are defederated from lemmit.online as the bots there was just far too much already but I'm curious about whether we should do the same for alien.top and or its sister instances (there's a lot).

If you aren't aware of what that is, it's a site ran by another instance that mirrors reddit content over into ghost subs and mirrors the comments as well.

Personally? I'm not a fan. Like, at all. I understand the desire but I feel like its not only asking for Reddit to throw down with a legal fit but also feels just... annoying. We don't need a critical mass of content, we need QUALITY content. More does not equal better.

The amount of spam is far too much, and the fact mod actions between software is busted right now does not help. It's unfortunate but the amount of spam is just absurd and annoying. :(

I'm keeping an eye on their development updates, hoping they can fix inter software mod actions sooner rather than later.

Sorry yall, it's clear that deleting some of the communities from there isn't enough right now :/

👀

As this community has grown I've been getting more and more reports regarding spam from other instances. If you don't like this community, you can just block it? It's pretty easy? Or since all the reports are from remote instances... you don't have to subscribe to it either?

Reports of ACTUAL advertising and spam will have action taken, obviously. But we have had none so far. I don't know what it is about this community that a small handful of people feel is spammy but there's things built into lemmy to prevent this community from being visible to you if it isn't your thing...

I was taking backups daily and encrypting them myself (yeah....) but thanks to @Arthur we got it automated now. It seems to work, but we are gonna test a restore in a controlled environment just to be sure soon.

Also, sorry for being a bit dead since this weekend. Have had to disengage for my own well-being a bit due to the giant uptick in antisemitism and horrific violent content being posted without any warnings whatsoever pretty much across everywhere online right now.

I'm here, checking reports and stuff. I'm also here and my DMs are always open for any questions or concerns.

<3

I can do a 13 days of horror books highlighting some horror books in !fiction@literature.cafe if there's any interest in that. It seems that making highlight posts made a lot of people engaged and started a lot of conversations. Thoughts? I'm willing to do like daily to weekly themed book highlights. I can even do nonfiction book highlights as well. I have a shit ton of books I know of.

https://pen.org/ - PEN America https://bannedbooksweek.org/let-freedom-read-day/ - banned books week official website https://www.ala.org/ - American Library Association

And of course if you have a local public library system, get a library card and support them. This goes beyond just going to the library as well, go to budget meetings and council meetings if you can. Stay vigilant to local ongoing funding plans within your city and county, and show up to defend libraries to make it clear you aren't there to fuck around.

As well, if you are a parent go to your local school board meetings and stop fascists from taking your board over. Get involved in your childs PTA, do activism work, and push back against Moms for Liberty. If you have the time, your kids public school needs you to show up and support them.

And obviously, keep reading. Thanks for the awesome comments and discussions this past week.

I'm considering more book highlights in this community too beyond banned books week, especially on the more obscure banned/challenged books. Would there be any interest in that at all?

Kicking off this week with a bang of a nobel prize winning author, and for good reason. This book was deeply disturbing to read but extremely important. It was such a beautifully upsetting piece of literature. The book was intense, yes, but it felt like I was reading thru a beautifully crafted painting.

Big warning though for child sexual abuse in this story, if you picked it up and have not read it yet.

Of course, this book is very contentious. Not only is it written by a black woman talking about race, but has the above content as well.

Have you read it? Any thoughts or feelings?

Here's the Wikipedia page regarding it's censorship and bans in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluest_Eye

This award winning book is about a young Nepalese girl who is sold into sexual slavery in India. I've read it, and it was extremely touching and horrifying. It was incredibly necessary to provide a glimpse into a world that many kids suffer thru every day around the world.

Of course, the book has been banned or challenged 24 times this year in the US.

Have you read this book? There was also a movie made about it as well.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.one/post/5019122

It’s the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week, a tradition that started in 1982. This year, the theme is “Let Freedom Read!” in honor of record-breaking efforts to censor books now sweeping the nation’s libraries and schools. Yesterday, I published a story about Wyoming’s Cambell County Public Library, which, after a controversy over sex-ed books, last year became the first library system in the country to officially break ties with the venerable American Library Association, leaving its staff without opportunities to apply for grants, attend conferences, and fulfill their profession’s continuing education requirements.

Not to be outdone, Moms for Liberty, the crusading parents’ rights group whose annual conferences I’ve covered for the last two years, has declared this is “Teach Kids to Read Week.“ Here’s how the group’s founders explained it in a statement to the conservative website Post Millennial:

“When…those pushing for so-called ‘Banned Book Week’ continue to try to keep porn in schools we must fight back. America’s kids no longer know how to read and rather than highlighting that issue, these groups want to allow kids to access pornographic materials and other inappropriate materials. This is unacceptable, and we are proud to continue to fight for America’s children and encourage kids to learn how to read.”

Moms for Liberty’s attempt to connect literacy instruction to “pornographic materials” is part of a relatively new campaign to capitalize on the failure of a progressive movement in the teaching of reading. A spate of recent reporting has revealed that a popular approach called “balanced literacy,” which encouraged children to use context clues and guess when they couldn’t decode a word, didn’t actually help many kids learn to read. Moms for Liberty claims now that teachers are focused on in LGBTQ and anti-racist lessons instead of teaching kids how to decode words. I explained in a piece a few months back:

[Moms for Liberty] charges that schools have overstepped their bounds by teaching students progressive values—acceptance of all sexual and gender identities, for instance, or how to fight against racism—instead of focusing solely on academics. Now, these groups have taken up the failure of balanced-literacy instruction as further evidence of the utter failure of progressive education in perhaps the most important skill a child learns in school. In the process, they’ve launched the latest version of an age-old political fight over reading. Basically, the argument from parents’ rights groups can be boiled down to this: Don’t believe us that public schools have sacrificed education at the altar of progressive educational schemes? Just look at how miserably they’ve failed in teaching our kids to read.

“There is a lot of time being spent on ‘social-emotional learning’ and not so much time being spent on effective reading instruction in the classroom,” the Moms for Liberty account tweeted on May 21. “Why is literacy not being prioritized like sexual education is currently? Why does a 5yo need to learn about gender identity?”

What is the exact scenario in which an inclusive curriculum somehow replaces phonics-based reading instruction? Moms for Liberty has yet to explain exactly how this happens. Meanwhile, if you’d like to celebrate Banned Books Week by reading a few of the most censored, there’s a list here.