Bad Influence.

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Middle school is mid teens, right? I interpreted those children in the comic as younger.

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I disagree. The intelligence to understand the language is separate from the maturity to handle the content.

And yes they're seeing things on the internet... and shouldn't be. That's a long-standing debate in society about how heavily to shield them from it. But do you think the fact an 8 year-old might see awful things on tiktok means there's no value in telling them to wait a few years before reading a book like 1984?

Flying Squid

What 8-year-old is reading any Orwell? You're talking about something that is probably an issue for .00001% of people at that age. Like 3 or 4 prodigies. So why do these bans which, again, do not differentiate between 7 and 17, need to be in place?

Also, where are the parents of these 8-year-olds? Shouldn't they be aware of what their child is getting from the library?

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It sounds like we're talking cross purposes now. I don't know what children are reading Orwell. Not like in the comic, I imagine. For that matter, I hope most children are not, in fact, seeing videos of cats being killed.

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The UK CPS would like a word with you concerning your problematic online speech....

MacN'Cheezus

I mean, it's literally the premise of this comic that the kid goes to a library that has already banned the book. How does he know it exists at all? And if he thinks he ought to be able to get it at the library, why wouldn't he think of trying to find it on the Internet instead?

Kids these days were literally born after the iPhone was invented, they have never even known a time where you couldn't access the Internet from almost anywhere in the world using a device small enough to fit in your pocket, and somehow you think they'd be too stupid to even try?

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They regularly saw friends and neighbors persecuted by police. We don’t really see that in the modern day.

Maybe you don't...

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Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Flying Squid

Believe it or not, comics are not reality.

Again, where is this hypothetical 8-year-old's parents?

Flying Squid

Kids are seeing a hell of a lot more violent videos than they are reading Orwell. That was even true when I was a kid in the 80s. I saw every Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movie that came out while I was in elementary school.

Amazingly, it didn't leave me horribly scarred.

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Tweens know what sex is. This is needlessly prudish. They all have seen graphic videos/images of people blown apart on the beaches of Normandy by this point

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No but Huck Finn, To Kill a Mocking Bird, and other American literary classics are regularly banned/brought back across the US. They use justifications such as “coarse language” and other bullshit, but it’s almost always books that speak truth to power/about systemic bigotry in the US.

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That'll be next week in the U.S.

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Wahou... I never knew ban/brought back book was commun in some place. That's wild.

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I did say 1984 is probably not apt for those under tween age. The cartoon post depicting the kids don't look like tweens. They look like seven or eight years old or maybe even younger.

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My bad I missed the “under”

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Oh yeah it’s been a problem for a long time and it’s only gotten worse since all conservative fixation on libraries and CRT picked up.

MacN'Cheezus

Probably at work I'd assume. Were you never a teenager?

Flying Squid

First of all, the kids in this comic are clearly not teenagers, so you need to decide whether or not you're talking about the comic since you were one post ago.

Secondly, you have not even acknowledged that these book banning laws will end up imprisoning librarians. It's all about how kids, if they are somehow magically aware of it, can bypass libraries to read certain specific books that are banned.

Cool, now how do they get access to Gender Queer or The Bluest Eye? Because those are banned too and will also put librarians in prison and they are not in the public domain. How about And Tango Makes Three, the often-banned picture book for children, which is a true story about two male penguins in a zoo that adopted a baby chick. A librarian letting a kid have access to a book about penguins could end up in prison for it.

Because as it is, you seem to be implying that the only banned book of any significance is 1984 and if librarians get imprisoned for letting someone under 18 read it, good.

ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed

Fun fact: 1984 by George Orwell is legal in China

but as you can see, it doesnt matter

people don't make the connection to IRL