Bad Influence.

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I completely believe that's the only thing you can surmise

GladiusB

Some really do think it is. And I feel sorry for them. My ex-wife's mother was one that put her in one of those teenage camps. Convinced they were what could help her by the church and her friends. But she's just not smart. Very gullible. I really don't think she would have had she known. The zeitgeist of the times were not as abundant as it is now.

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It was banned in both the Soviet Union and the US.
In the Soviet Union it was banned for being anti-communist.
In the US it was banned for being communist.

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On that note, what Linux distro are best for privacy?

Funnily enough, GrapheneOS Android.

All popular general purpose Linux Desktop distros suck in terms of privacy and security out of the box. It is possible to configure stuff like SELinux but that is very far above what even a competent Linux user is able to do properly.

Tails and QubesOS are amazing in terms of security and privacy, but their lack of general usability means very few people are going to use them.

fxomt

Orwell was trolling before it even existed lmao

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The 1984 government did not hide that stuff in your hozse. The telescreens are the centerpiece of any appartements. The difference is that in the book, everybody knows they are supervised and fear the supervisors, while today, nobody cares.

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Nah he was just anti-authoritarian and both the US and USSR governments saw themselves reflected in the text

fxomt

lmao, yeah thats why i love his books.

its crazy to me how people will read it and not realize the main point was anti authoritarianism/totalitarianism, and think it was about socialism despite orwell himself being a democratic socialist. Most be up in the list of most misinterpreted writers

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At this point, any of them.

Strictly speaking, fully loaded Kali Linux (or an equivalent build) so you can learn to do subversive things against adversarial networks.

But really, if you just want an operating system under your control, every version of Linux will do that for you.

But Hannah Montana Linux will do it for you with the most style.

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1984, Fahrenheit 451, To kill a mockingbird and several others were among the banned books in my school.

Ironically tho, Mein Kampf was still sitting proudly on the shelf. Of a middle school library...

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I don't follow american book ban list. Is it actually ban?

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This is literally what YouTube is like though. The less educational content is, the more likely they are to remove or age restrict it. NileGreen made a video about this recently, it's kinda long but you can watch it if this sounds interesting.

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That's funny, they were both required reading where I am in the U.S.

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I don't think it's currently on any ban lists in the US; if it is, it's just in a few odd corners. It has been on ban lists around the world in the past for various reasons.

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It comes down to framing. You put Animal Farm (unapologetically anti-Soviet Union) and 1984 (more broadly anti-authoritarian) on the required reading list for high schools. You haven't provided any education around Marxist theory anywhere in the curriculum besides "communism bad". That lets you transfer the idea that the USSR is representative of all leftist thought, and these books are about the USSR. Breeze over all the stuff in 1984 that points to any kind of leftist theory--which Orwell helps with because he expects people to get bored and skip that whole bit--and boom, Orwell becomes an anti-leftist icon.

If Homage to Catalonia were also added to the curriculum, this whole farce would be torn down.

fxomt

True. without much context other than knowing animal farm was written against the soviet union for example, it's easy to think that.

Orwell becomes an anti-leftist icon.

Honestly this is a really interesting phenomenon, where very famous figures being leftist/socialist is conveniently left out. MLK, Einstein, Orwell, Picasso, Nelson Mandela. They were all socialists yet that is not taught.

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1984 is more appropriate for adolescents than for kids under tweens. If anyone has read the ending, the imagery in Room 101 is pretty graphic. There are also sexually suggestive imagery in the middle of the book.

The best dystopian book for kids that warns of authoritarianism would be Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm imo. The latter was my introduction to George Orwell by my teacher just before I entered adolescence.

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Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves - PEN America

This report on book bans in the 2023-24 school year documents how censorial trends have continued to ripple beyond the shelves.

PEN America (pen.org)

Disproportionate to publishing rates and like prior school years, books in this prominent subset overwhelmingly include books with people and characters of color (44%) and books with LGBTQ+ people and characters (39%).

Over half (57%) of the banned titles in this subset include sex-related themes or depictions, due to ramped up attacks on “sexual content.”

Nearly 60% of these banned titles are written for young adult audiences, and depict topics young people confront in the real world, including grief and death, experiences with substance abuse, suicide, depression and mental health concerns, and sexual violence.

If you pick around for schools with bans, you can occasionally find 1984 on the list. But that is primarily because of the extramarital sex scene between Wilson Smith (the protagonist) and his lover Julia.

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I watched the library in my high school downsized repeatedly during and after my time in school.

They went from half a dozen librarians to one. They purged their collections of microfilm and whittled away any research tools that weren't just on a computer. They stopped ordering new books for the most part by the time my sister graduated.

I believe they've since renovated the space to convert a big chunk of it into more classrooms.

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everybody knows they are supervised and fear the supervisors

They regularly saw friends and neighbors persecuted by police. We don't really see that in the modern day. There's no cop who bangs on your door because you did a wrongthink online.