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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

The number 1 banned book in this list has 147 bans... there are something like 15,000 school districts in the US.

This doesn't seem to be a particularly large problem.

Depends on how big the chilling effect is, no? For example, if a school librarian notices that a colleague in another district loses their job or worse, gets personal threats because of a specific book, they might well remove a book from shelves before it's challenged.

That is not a rebuttal to your point -- I don't have a guess on whether or not the chilling effect is significant. I'm just noting there are follow-on effects to be considered.

My point is we all need to moderate our reactions to things based on actual scale, across the political spectrum rare events are being amplified to make people think they're prevalent disasters and it distorts too many peoples' reality.

There are much worse, much bigger problems and we need to constantly be reminding people of how big issues actually are. Book bannings are concerning but what is the size of the actual impact? I see this issue more of as an embarrassment for a handful of schools and boards who are bowing to moralizing fools, people are acting like they're afraid of an escalation to Fahrenheit 451 when we really should be mocking the book banners for their foolishness instead of being afraid of them.

This is far from the only issue suffering from a lack of sense of scale.

It goes far beyond that. The Iowa legislature has already moved to make changes to how libraries work in Iowa as a result of all of the attention these issues are getting here. They're essentially trying to condense the power to the state level instead of at the municipal level, where it belongs. It's a power grab that'll have repercussions that may very well cause the smallest of libraries here to cease existing.

And it all started with people complaining about books in the library.

I don't disagree with the underlying point, I just don't agree that the effects of this particular issue are all that minimal. Mockery only gets you so far when the moralizing fools are, say, serving as Speaker of the House.

Probably also worth asking if this problem is really independent, or if it's a facet of larger, more clearly damaging trends.

PEN America accounts for that. You should read the following: https://pen.org/report/the-normalization-of-book-banning/#:~...

This does on account for soft bans like undisclosed do not buy lists. No need to ban what you are not allowed to buy.

Really depends on the size of the school districts. There are districts with more than a 100,000 students and there are those with barely 100.

This is like saying "there are only 147 cities and towns who voted for X while 15,000 towns didn't, therefore X is very unpopular" without taking into account how many voters live in those cities/towns.

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