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Thursday June 7, 2007
Glimpse from inside the Vamos a Cuba appeal. The ACLU is all like, “All a publicly elected body has to do to ban a book is utter the word inaccurate? If that’s the case every library administrator and library association in the country should be worried.” And the judges are all like, “[what about] a book about Adolf Hitler that would credit the Nazi leader with creating the Volkswagen and bringing Germany out of the depression — but not mention the Holocaust.” Also, for the sake of posterity, I’m mirroring the court documents posted at the Herald: School Board’s Complaint [PDF]. ACLU’s response [PDF].
Tags: censorship, cubans, law · Comment feed: RSS, atom
Just to play devil’s advocate, I’d like to preemptively address the Godwin’s law issue. Here’s the Wikipedia page on the law.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Also: It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued,[3] that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.
I think this misses the important point that Nazi/Hitler analogies are often used exactly because they’re the extreme example.
In philosophical discussions, the killing of babies is also used as such an edge case. Note also the line “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
The fallacy that “Adolf Hitler (or the Nazi party) supported X; therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad” is indeed wrong. However, invoking H/N in a thought experiment is not wrong — if a principle is claimed to truly apply in all cases, then it must be able to hold up to edge cases. For moral issues, H/N are a perfectly suitable edge case.
Such is the use in the example above. Clear-headed individuals will, indeed, oppose the banning of a book that puts Hitler in a positive light.
Uh, wrong. That would be the case if the book puts Castro in a positive light, but it does not. Castro, the regime, the political system, etc aren’t even mentioned.
The analogy fails again. But I wouldn’t expect somebody who likes the “killing of babies” analogy to understand why.
Banning books is poor policy for the land of the free. We should stop fearing contradicting opinions and embrace the availability of contrasting viewpoints – even if they are historically inaccurate. The Bible is the world’s most popular book, but it is also a compilation containing known inaccuracies. Are we to ban Bibles from libraries?
I would go the route of the music industry and support labeling disputed books with a warning, possibly a URL or ID number, so the reader (or parent) can see why the book is deemed objectionable. Given the multitude of challenges currently facing our school districts, it is disheartening to learn that we would even entertain the notion of prohibiting students from reading.
What’s next? Canceling Recess?? Oh yeah…
It’s certainly possible for a book to portray Castro in a positive light by not mentioning “the harsh realities of life under a communist dictatorship” (as the Herald puts it). Since those realities are an overwhelming fact of life in Cuba, to avoid mentioning them, or to avoid framing them as consequences of communist dictatorship, is to portray Castro in a positive light. It’s like a biography of a mass-murderer that doesn’t mention the murders. There can be dishonesty by omission as well as by commission.
The school board’s decision not to make the book available in its libraries is a separate issue. It’s not like the book is unavailable outside of school libraries. Since the libraries can’t contain every book, there’s going to be some unavoidable arbitrariness in any decision about which books to put in them. Is it better that these arbitrary decisions get made by a school board that is at least somewhat accountable to the people it serves, or should they be made by a judge who is completely unaccountable? I think that’s the important question here.
The important question is the law and how it is applied. The judge eventually making the decision as the law should apply is better than biased school board members circumventing constitutional rights. I don’t care how far removed the judge is from SoFla.
Alex~
You’re missing the point. The situation the judge posits isn’t intended to be a perfect analogy with Vamos a Cuba — it’s a deliberate exaggeration. Yes, it does exaggerates along two lines.
The point isn’t liking the baby-killing analogy. The point is that when you’re talking about a hypothetical terrible thing, you want the most terrible thing possible.
Hope that clears it up!
Bystander~
It seems like we’re moving in a direction in this country where someone with some particularly held viewpoints can more and more avoid being confronted with anything that contradicts those viewpoints (eg websites, radio shows, even whole tv networks with a particular political bias). I wonder if such a labeling system wouldn’t just exacerbate that situation.
Of course I agree that banning books is moronic.
Jonathan~
I dunno. Is a book about the USA that doesn’t get into our wonderful democratic political system painting the country in an unfairly poor light? (I don’t know — i’m really asking.)
I don’t think the alternative to the school board’s deciding what books are in the libraries is for a judge to do so. The judge’s role, as b.a.c. says, is to decide whether it’s a good idea to have the school board overriding the decisions of librarians.
Nope, you and the judge are missing it. Reductio ad absurdum is never a good argument and certainly not in law (That’s the kind of thinking that leads to three-strikes laws, mandatory sentencing, etc).
Plus, the analogy is flawed not because it’s extreme, but because is not comparing two equal things. If you had a book titled “Castro the Best Person Who Ever Lived”, and want to compare Castro to Hitler then yeah, by all means. But you don’t.
And you do like the baby killing analogy. You brought it up before.
Jonathan, you haven’t read the book, have you?
Ah, I see the problem — you don’t understand how the justice system works. The judges on an appellate court don’t have quite the same function as in a regular court. They’re more like they would be in the Supreme court, where there’s a back and forth with the lawyers.
The judge isn’t saying he believes the book should be banned just like the hypothetical N/H book should be banned — he’s prompting the lawyer to spell out why either (1) one should be banned and the other not (ie what’s the principle by which you’d decide) or (2) whether/why they should both be allowed. He’s pushing the lawyer to make a particular case, not extending a case himself.
I’m not sure how interesting or important the second point, but I have no problem seeing that painting a rosy picture of life in Cuba by omitting the suffering that goes on there could be seen as a less extreme example of, or on the same continuum with, a view that actually has some praise for the regime.
Baby killing is an example. I raise it because I find it pertinent, not because I enjoy it.
Really Alesh? Explain to me why would I be confused with a “regular” court. In what instance in “regular” court does a judge introduce an argument? Where do I say the judge can’t question the lawyers with as many dumb analogies as he pleases?
A well-executed sarcastic retort requires at least a passing connection with the other person’s point. Otherwise all the infantile patronizing does is show you don’t get the issue and can’t keep up with the discussion. But why stop there? You want to go back and include a “here in the US” line, for effect?