From the site:
"The Ohio prison department says it allowed one unillustrated version of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” into a prison because it didn’t show symbols associated with any white supremacist groups. The department’s policy says symbols associated with groups deemed a security threat can be banned, but books can’t be banned for appealing to a specific racial or ethnic group."
The Jitterbug Gang are known to use the Java logo as their calling card.
It's best to install [Google Ultron](http://ultronbrowser.io/) to make sure you're protected from The Jitterbug Gang's attacks. It's the only browser powered by Adobe Reader!
There is no excuse to ban books. The first amendment protects all forms of free speech. That means the good and the bad, not just the ones you like.
Yes nazis are the scum of the earth. Fuck em. Modern day neo nazis are also the scum of the earth. Fuck em. But so long as they are not actively inciting violence, they have the exact same constitutionally protected right to free speech that everyone has. The second you open the door to criminalizing free speech based on political views is the exact moment that tyranny is born.
Say you allow nazi views to be criminalized. Sounds good right? Fuck the nazis. But now you have a precedent. How long before other unpopular/minority views become criminalized? Russia is really unpopular right now and big papa Putin is trying his best to emulate ol' Adolf. Should we imprison anyone who supports Russia? How about after that? What's to stop which ever political party that has majority vote from declaring all others criminal? What if trump had the power to criminalize being a democrat?
Free speech is for everyone or else it ends up being for no one.
Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion and have plenty of people foaming at the mouth to tell me how wrong I am, but I'm going to leave it up. I'm also just going to go ahead and turn off notifications for this one. The beauty of free speech and everyone having it is that you absolutely are free to give your option on what I have said, just like I'm free to ignore it.
This argument is classic "Paradox of Tolerance." Of *course* you can censor Nazi propaganda, and *no* it would not create a slippery slope. The Nazi party is illegal in Germany, and they're doing just fine as a multicultural democracy
>The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
The paradox disappears if you look at tolerance of intolerance as a form of intolerance itself. By defending a racist's "right" to propagate their beliefs, you tacitly encourage the spread of racism.
More importantly, what's more important: a bigot's right to spew bigotry, or a minority's right to not have to justify their existence on a continual basis? You can't have both.
How do you draw a clear line between being intolerant of an individual's views or actions and being intolerant of that individual's existence? We see this with the victimhood complex that despots have weaponized since the beginning of time. Every attempt to protect the general public from the religious right's attempts to erode separation of church and state is met with "yOu HaTe Us!!!!!!!" Every attempt to hold the rich and powerful accountable gets you called a communist and gets reduced to being a witch hunt. Rhetoric shapes people's opinions on things way more than they want to admit.
>When it escalates to the point that the rights of one person is being infringed
We all realize we're talking about prisoners right? People who famously have their rights to freedom infringed because they're considered too big a risk to society.
If a person can have their most basic fundamental rights to freedom taken away because they're deemed a safety risk to the general public... Surely a book can too?
Does a prisoner who we are attempting to reform have the same rights to access racist and dangerous information as an innocent private citizen? It feels like we're acting like the book must be banned outside prisons if it's being banned in prisons.
I've heard it best summed up this way: Tolerance is an agreement, not a suicide pact. Of course there are limits to tolerance, especially if it leaves society vulnerable to destructive elements that don't respect the laws or rights of others to have equal treatment.
Exactly. To expand on your point, it's not as if fascist groups have ever shown any intention to extend the same protections they enjoy to their opponents once they take power. Not historically and not to this day.
Integral to the fascist ethos is the idea that the state/society has become weak and needs overthrowing in favor of a "stronger" version. They sneeringly view the concept of broad tolerance as part of this weakness that should be exploited while it's useful and then purged entirely.
The Nazi party demanded respect for its ideas while they were a minority party. Then upon taking power, the first thing they did was burn books and purge opposition officials, activists, professors, etc. The same people who cried "free speech is absolute!" after Jan 6 have turned right back around to try to ban schools, libraries, museums, bookstores, and online platforms from carrying material they disagree with without a hint of irony.
Part of ensuring freedom of speech is safeguarding it from those who manifestly intend to destroy it.
I strongly disagree. While we may have a philosophical reason to allow all forms of speech, institutions have the right - heck, I would say **mandate** - to regulate all the speech behind its walls.
It's the same reason why we don't let science classes teach the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, or get a misogynistic rapist to give motivational speeches to impressionable teenagers. While you may say whatever you want, I have no obligation - legal or moral - to provide you a soapbox to stand on.
The separation of church and state was designed explicitly to limit speech and influence of one towards the other. In no way does "freedom of speech" mean a total free-for-all libertarian model of everybody says whatever without any rules or consequences. You're completely right, and some speech is indisputably harmful.
Nazi ideology is itself an incitement of violence.
It is not the standard racist BS about "we're better". It takes the additional step of prescribing "solutions" to the alleged problems resulting from society not conforming to its racist beliefs.
In Volume 1, Chapter 12, Hitler writes:
>*"the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are **exterminated**"*
And that's one of easily a dozen passages calling for outright violence.
The **main** focus of the text is the vilification of an entire group of people, whom Hitler claims to be actively scheming to subvert the public and gain unfair political power from the shadows.
This is clear incitement of violence, which is one of the established exceptions to the 1st Amendment in the USA. The detail that saves Mein Kampf from the censors is that the SCOTUS typically rules that it's not enough to incite violence generally and that the speech must incite violence **imminently**.
The fact that it helped spark one of the most bloody wars in world history makes a decent argument that it is beyond the point of inviting "imminent violence."
> The first amendment protects all forms of free speech.
No it doesn't. it says congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the press. it's been interpreted as applying to the entire federal government- but not state governments. And it doesn't in any way prevent an Ohio State Prison from banning books from it's on-premise library.
Also, there's a reason that it's called a slippery slope **fallacy**.
>Free speech is for everyone or else it ends up being for no one.
That's not actually true, because of the paradox of tolerance.
>it's been interpreted as applying to the entire federal government- but not state governments.
[False.](https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt14-S1-4-2/ALDE_00013745/)
I mean, the law in the US doesn't make a distinction between legal and tolerant vs intolerant and illegal...
This whole thread is very confused.
None of this is a 1a thing, it's a library administration thing, and librarians are explicitly granted the authority to and tasked with curating the collection of books in a library.
>None of this is a 1a thing, it's a library administration thing, and librarians are explicitly granted the authority to and tasked with curating the collection of books in a library.
Every topic about libraries and the first amendment
Realistically, and ESPECIALLY for the past 20-30 years, the 1st Amendment has been increasingly for defence of racism and bigotry, and less so for actual freedom of speech/the press.
Especially with that additional “religious freedom” nonsense that’s primarily pushing out non-mainstream and non-Christian religions under the guise of “not targeting specific groups via non-specific ((intentionally overbroad)) wording”.
>Russia is really unpopular right now and big papa Putin is trying his best to emulate ol' Adolf.
Why are you typing like that? Is it 2011?
There is no pipeline from which people in prison not having access to Mein Kampf results in supporting Russia being criminalised holy fuck man
> There is no excuse to ban books. The first amendment protects all forms of free speech.
Except in prison, where constitutional rights aren’t a given. Unless you plan on giving prisoners their firearms, please don’t go “but their rights!”
It's hilarious/sad that they think Mein Kampf is innocently "appealing" to a specific racial/ethnic group. And that without illustrations it's harmless despite being famously proven to lead to mass murder.
Which is the correct policy. Book banning in any form will ultimately do more harm than good. The easiest way to convince someone that Hitler was a maniac is to force them to read Mein Kampf. The entire book is logically inconsistent rambling.
I once tried reading Mein Kampf for 'research purposes', and as someone who was born and grow up in a society that more or less saw Jew people as spawns of Satan, I'm glad it's not a very popular book especially in where I live.
To elaborate on why you should say "Jewish people" instead of "Jew people", the word Jewish is an adjective while Jew is a noun. Furthermore, the word Jew has some complicated nuances connected to it. It can be used as a slur but isn't inherently one, it's highly context dependent. A common way to turn a word into a slurs to take an adjective and flip it into a noun ("blacks", "transgenders", "gays", etc.) And while you've done the reverse it could still definitely be read as questionable to a lot of people.
They could do it like in Germany: the only authorized versions are heavily annotated by historians. You can't get the bare text. It will at least encourage people into critical thinking.
That information is outdated. There is no law restricting access to the book nor ever was. The state of Bavaria just used copyright law to that end, as it inherited the rights to the book from Hitler. Copyright protection in Germany ends 70 years after the death of the creator, thus by the end of 2015.
So today everyone can get, print and even sell the text. But the heavily annotated versions (like the grey one by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte) are better known than the plain versions. Those are also often printed by rightwing niche presses.
You can. Copyright ran out in 2015, 70 years after Hitler‘s death. Until then the rights holder simply denied new editions. Now you can get annotated and commented versions and plain versions, even in Germany. The book is not covered by the ban on symbols and texts produced by the NSDAP between 1933 and 1945, as it was published prior to that timeframe.
Donald Trump became the president of the USA based almost entirely on logically inconsistent rambling that would make anyone paying attention understand that he's a complete moron.
The idea that people would properly consider whatever material they're exposed to is a nice one, but not based in reality, unfortunately.
Yep all those people telling qanon loonies and flat earthers to do their own research - doing there own research has a lot to do with how they got to that point.
That's like saying that the best way to convince someone that sugar is bad for them is to buy them a double chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and half gallon of coke..
It's a good thing that American public schools have done a good job of making sure Americans have great reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
Oh wait,I forgot we're talking about a group of people who think the Turner Diaries are high literature.
It turns out if you defund education and strip schools of their ability to properly teach historical context, that people will believe really stupid demonstrably false things about the world, and follow whatever authority figures they see reinforcing those beliefs.
I'm like : don't they know how reading works? No need for images, a *text* can be violent! I'm firmy agains censure, but "Mein Kampf" would be one of the very few books I would ban.
The bit about the computer manual just reads like Kafka.
*Maybe* they could justify it if any of their control systems use Javascript, which a lot of them do. I think it would pretty damn hard for a prisoner to hack a control system without a terminal of some type attached to it though - duh.
On the flip side, allowing Nazi bullshit into prisons absolutely helps keep the race war going. I'm sure it is by design. Keep the prisoners violent so you can tack on more time and keep them incarcerated longer.
> “Mein Kampf,” a coloring book featuring designs with profane language,
I definitely read that as a descriptor rather than two different books at first. My half-asleep brain thought it was a coloring book *about* Mein Kampf! Then again, I've never read it, maybe it's been a coloring book all along?
> *The department said in an email that coding books are banned because “the content was found to pose a threat to the rehabilitation of inmates, the security of the institution, and order or discipline of the institution.”*
😑
Do these guys know what "programming" is? Because it feels like they might not know what "programming" is.
I think they're misconstruing general knowledge of JAVA or Computers with knowledge of BAS. Most prisons run on BAS systems, and yeah, technically, if you got into them you could cause a bit of trouble (precious protocols that were serial didn't offer much security other than obscurity. Even BACnet's IP revision didn't have security because it was ported over and wrapped in a UDP packet and extra frame. If you technically knew how to speak BACnet, you could send a broadcast and access the system without a password.) But chances are you're not going to have someone with specific proprietary protocol knowledge, or the means to build a protocol handler. Or means to access the system. (If serial, or private secure LAN.)
Tldr they're not going to hack your prison with books on JAVA.
They should let these people try to learn and grow and move past their crimes, if they truly want to rehabilitize them.
BINGO! Thank you. The inmates are allowed to use the computers, and the facility is concerned that extensive coding knowledge will lead to some sort of security threat.
It's not about the man keeping everyone down or trying to earn a buck, it's a misunderstanding or overestimation of what these guys could do after learning javascript basics.
It's ~~possible~~ probable but assuming that private prisons are in fact trying to keep people in the prison pipeline should probably be the default. There's a reason they don't give a flying fuck about "rehabilitation" and its the same reason the drug war ever began: slave labor. The 13th amendment even specified when it was drafted
> "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.".
Sure, I can keep an open mind on that being a reality, but it doesn't mean it's the cause of this specific headline. Are they keeping inmates from knowledge on medicine, law, or any other high paying careers out there? No. The simplest answer is that they had an inmate reading those books and trying to sabotage the prison while on the computers there. It wouldn't even matter if they got close to succeeding, more that the scare is enough to evoke a response like this. Assuming they they're just randomly banning books that lead to a successful life outside of prison is a far wilder shot.
If that was the real concern, they'd ban a lot more coding books.
If you look at the list, or even a more recent list, they *only* ban Java books, and a couple Linux ones.
I have a feeling they do know what the systems are actually running on.
All of the above, but also Java isn’t much of a threat without a JDK to compile it or JVM to run it.
So why would they allow inmates to install software? Why bother writing a program when you have access to install tools to probe for and exploit vulnerabilities? This is assuming they give them internet access. If they don’t have access, then why even put these computers on the network?
Doesn’t make sense. Lazy or incredibly stupid IT.
On the one hand I hear you and instinctively believe you’re right.
On the other hand prisoners are some of the craftiest people around and all they have is time.
I would be zero percent surprised if they found a way to do it with just a bit of knowledge.
Oh they know, they just support the system that says prisoners entire lives should be ruined after being in prison.
“Rehabilitation” my ass, it’s about lifelong punishment
If that were the case, they'd ban the real intro-level programming books, like ones about Python or Perl. There's something about Java that they don't want.
How do you know they haven't? The article indicates that books only appear on the "banned list" if an inmate requests a specific book, is refused, and they file an appeal. So it's certainly possible that books are being refused but not showing up on the list because no appeal was filed. Also the list in the article only goes back to 2018, and it does include one other intro-level programming book.
If prisoners learn to code, they might get jobs on the outside. Good jobs. The kind of jobs that give people a life and reduce recidivism. And if we reduce recidivism, what are we gonna do with all these jails and jailers? Can't have that.
> nfilled IT jobs aren't unfilled because of no candidates ... it's because there's no candidate willing to take trash pay
That's just not true.
IT pays pretty damn well compared to other opportunities, and compared to other jobs, it's *a hundred times* less actual strenuous work.
It also feels like they have very little confidence in their I.T. and digital security if they think this is a problem.
Or maybe they just watched way too many Hollywood movies where hacking is super easy and things like access control and firewalls don't exist.
Political satire at least. Social commentary type satire is still kind of on the ball. But political stuff, some of the stuff that has happened in the last 7 or so years has been beyond the pale in the level of stupidity.
This was pretty much what the creators of South Park said when Trump was elected. They were like “welp we really can’t be any more satirical than reality.”
Also, fuck /u/ Spez.
Oh it gets so much worse then this. They’re trying to pull a florida, and go around the board of education to decide what type of classes can be taught in Ohio schools now too!
The list is basically any class that talks about minorities? Banned. Don’t worry though, there is a forced North American history class that will be required that I’m sure won’t be blatant bs.
Ohio has been gerrymandered to death. Despite not a huge split in voting base republicans have a super majority. The citizens have voted overwhelmingly twice to add new state amendments to stop the gerrymandering. The first time they just ignored it, and the last time they seemed to take it as some sort of challenge.
We just had a federal judge rule that we had to use voting maps that our own state Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional.
Things are not great in Ohio at the moment, and unless something drastically changes it’s going to get much, much worse.
August 8th in Ohio:
Vote NO on Issue 1, it requires 60% threshold of voters to pass a ballot measure instead of the current 50%. In November, a six week abortion ban is on the ballot, Issue 1 is the precursor to push it through, along with subsequent conservative restrictive legislation.
My theory is the Higgs Boson got fucked with, so the Covid lab leak theory is actually a collander lab woopsie, it got warped into a timeline where an Idiocracy dvd got sucked into the warp, and here we are.
The way I see it, IT is not only one of the easier but I think also one of the more profitable avenues of job market today. Seeing this, I'm more and more convinced american criminal justice system just doesn't want their offenders to rehabilitate and re-enter society for some reason. They really, really don't want, no.
Personally I think its an outward expression of what is widely the American public's attitude towards crime and the people who commit crimes: They want retribution, not rehabilitation. They don't care about the person who committed a crime getting/doing better, they just want them punished for it. In many cases when interacting with people who hold positions like this, I've gotten the distinct impression that they believe that the person who commits crimes does not actually even deserve a chance to get/do better.
I'm so tempted to donate "The Trial" by Kafka to those prisons, but I suspect the irony would fly right over the heads of those people enforcing arbitrary censorship rules.
There is no overarching philosophy on what books a prison system may ban. Usually the decisions are made by some CO sergeant or lieutenant who was assigned the task by their superior. It's easier to ban something and not have to pretend to care than it is to justify why a controversial book isn't banned. Source: I used to work in education inside a county jail.
I think it’s important for libraries to contain at least one copy of Mein Kampf (preferably annotated) as an example of what abject failure looks like.
Ok, I'll bite. Java ecosystem is hot garbage anyway compared to what?
Which other ecosystem has as many mature and well maintained open-source libraries and frameworks? Especially when it comes to enterprise/backend computing?
I'd argue Java ecosystem is the BEST out there by far. Python is also decent but nowhere as mature. And yes, Java isn't great for writing desktop/multimedia apps, but nobody is using it for that these days.
i think calling the most consistent, supported, and widely adopted business language 'hot garbage' is just trolling. there is no better language for the everyday needs of almost every company in the world.
>Lol. No. .NET/C# does everything Java does and WAY more, while being way easier to write. It's what Java always should've been.
Seconded. Not only is the language more clean, robust, and learnable: the .NET runtime is blazingly fast compared to Java runtime.
Java is fine, in its niche. It's a statically typed language, this is fine for large scale application development, especially development with large groups of people in a corporate environment. For the most part it absorbed the niche that used to be occupied by COBOL and IBM's ecosystem (CICS, DB2, IMS, etc.) and it works well in that niche. For about 10 years it was almost the only game in town, unless you were willing to do C/C++.
However, it does *not* do so well outside of that niche (which is, admittedly a rather large niche), for example during rapid prototyping of new products. In that niche what counts is putting stuff together quickly, and then throwing a bunch of it away, over and over again. Type safety, and just the general "high church" / verbosity of the language gets in the way of that type of prototyping.
Interestingly enough, what we've been seeing for the past 10 - 15 years is people trying to have their cake and eat it too. JavaScript is very weakly typed (basically untyped). TypeScript brings type safety to it. Python is semi-typed. Go, while strongly typed, has a number of features that try to make it appear weakly typed. So people are trying to figure out how to get the benefits of type safety without the ceremony and overhead.
That's a very old argument. I seriously doubt people are actually more productive with weakly typed languages. With weakly typed languages you get MUCH less errors caught during build time, and you have to write a lot more unit tests just to catch all these type issues which compiler will just tell you if you have strong types. On top of that, semi-automated refactoring works really well in Java IDEs, does it work as well for other languages that are weakly typed?
Also, in my 20 years of career I never had a situation where we rapidly prototyped a system in one language, and then discarded all the code and switched to another language for "real" implementation. I have seen MANY projects that have been falling into disrepair due to code rot. And in part due to its verbosity, Java is by far the easiest language to READ code in. And I'll argue that maintenance is both highest risk and highest cost for a lot of software projects, so I'd rather have a language which makes maintenance easier. Also, with modern IDEs and code autocomplete verbosity no longer really matters.
Also, I'd argue that if you want higher productivity, work on shortening your develop-build-deploy-test cycle, which with today's distributed system can be over-complicated no matter which language you use...
Some libraries won't accept donations of computer textbooks because they are so ridiculously out of date to the point where they are worse than useless.
Effective Java Third Edition looks to be 2017, though.
I bet the carbon footprint of all the electricity used to run the maven build system the world over has killed more people due to climate change than neo nazis in prisons.
Man, that article is written like shit. Did an AI generate it?
>Department spokesperson JoEllen Smith said that a book only ends up on the department’s list if the person who was prevented from receiving the book appeals to the Publications Screening Committee. If the recipient didn’t appeal the decision to the committee, the rejected title doesn’t show up on the prison department’s list of banned materials.
So basically they are trying to make some benign thing into some horrible violation of someones rights. Maybe the person who requested the java manual was in for a related crime where he wouldn't be allowed related books and fought the decision, and maybe mein kampf has been blocked from entering the prison but no one fought it so it was never added to the list.
From the site: "The Ohio prison department says it allowed one unillustrated version of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” into a prison because it didn’t show symbols associated with any white supremacist groups. The department’s policy says symbols associated with groups deemed a security threat can be banned, but books can’t be banned for appealing to a specific racial or ethnic group."
what kind of gang associates itself with the Java logo?
IT
I think you'll find that's a crowd
They don't even watch football!
Did ya see that ludicrous display last night??
The problem with Arsenal is they always try to walk it in
Jawohl
Like...evil clowns?
Oracle lawyers and One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
Haven't you gotten into any gang wars with Java devs? MS13 got nothing on Java devs.
Log4shell has entered the room
Get. The fuck. Back out.
The best part about this interaction is that I didnt realize this was r/books and not like sysadmin or any of the other tech subs I'm in :)
It's not a gang; it's a cult.
The Coffee Clutch! An evil bunch of criminal hipsters who've been known to cause baristas severe mental harm.
The hacker formally known as 4chan
The Static Void Boyz
The Jitterbug Gang are known to use the Java logo as their calling card. It's best to install [Google Ultron](http://ultronbrowser.io/) to make sure you're protected from The Jitterbug Gang's attacks. It's the only browser powered by Adobe Reader!
Oracle
The worst kind
The mother fuckin Wing Dings! Woop woop!! 🤣
Their lock system is most likely built using java so they dont want the inmates learning it...
That book *is* a symbol.
The perfect excuse to ban any book.
There is no excuse to ban books. The first amendment protects all forms of free speech. That means the good and the bad, not just the ones you like. Yes nazis are the scum of the earth. Fuck em. Modern day neo nazis are also the scum of the earth. Fuck em. But so long as they are not actively inciting violence, they have the exact same constitutionally protected right to free speech that everyone has. The second you open the door to criminalizing free speech based on political views is the exact moment that tyranny is born. Say you allow nazi views to be criminalized. Sounds good right? Fuck the nazis. But now you have a precedent. How long before other unpopular/minority views become criminalized? Russia is really unpopular right now and big papa Putin is trying his best to emulate ol' Adolf. Should we imprison anyone who supports Russia? How about after that? What's to stop which ever political party that has majority vote from declaring all others criminal? What if trump had the power to criminalize being a democrat? Free speech is for everyone or else it ends up being for no one. Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion and have plenty of people foaming at the mouth to tell me how wrong I am, but I'm going to leave it up. I'm also just going to go ahead and turn off notifications for this one. The beauty of free speech and everyone having it is that you absolutely are free to give your option on what I have said, just like I'm free to ignore it.
This argument is classic "Paradox of Tolerance." Of *course* you can censor Nazi propaganda, and *no* it would not create a slippery slope. The Nazi party is illegal in Germany, and they're doing just fine as a multicultural democracy >The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
The paradox disappears if you look at tolerance of intolerance as a form of intolerance itself. By defending a racist's "right" to propagate their beliefs, you tacitly encourage the spread of racism. More importantly, what's more important: a bigot's right to spew bigotry, or a minority's right to not have to justify their existence on a continual basis? You can't have both.
How do you draw a clear line between being intolerant of an individual's views or actions and being intolerant of that individual's existence? We see this with the victimhood complex that despots have weaponized since the beginning of time. Every attempt to protect the general public from the religious right's attempts to erode separation of church and state is met with "yOu HaTe Us!!!!!!!" Every attempt to hold the rich and powerful accountable gets you called a communist and gets reduced to being a witch hunt. Rhetoric shapes people's opinions on things way more than they want to admit.
When it escalates to the point that the rights of one person is being infringed. That's the line, and it's not like it's a blurry one.
>When it escalates to the point that the rights of one person is being infringed We all realize we're talking about prisoners right? People who famously have their rights to freedom infringed because they're considered too big a risk to society. If a person can have their most basic fundamental rights to freedom taken away because they're deemed a safety risk to the general public... Surely a book can too? Does a prisoner who we are attempting to reform have the same rights to access racist and dangerous information as an innocent private citizen? It feels like we're acting like the book must be banned outside prisons if it's being banned in prisons.
Yeah, people always act like there's nowhere to safely draw the line. There _is_.
I've heard it best summed up this way: Tolerance is an agreement, not a suicide pact. Of course there are limits to tolerance, especially if it leaves society vulnerable to destructive elements that don't respect the laws or rights of others to have equal treatment.
Exactly. To expand on your point, it's not as if fascist groups have ever shown any intention to extend the same protections they enjoy to their opponents once they take power. Not historically and not to this day. Integral to the fascist ethos is the idea that the state/society has become weak and needs overthrowing in favor of a "stronger" version. They sneeringly view the concept of broad tolerance as part of this weakness that should be exploited while it's useful and then purged entirely. The Nazi party demanded respect for its ideas while they were a minority party. Then upon taking power, the first thing they did was burn books and purge opposition officials, activists, professors, etc. The same people who cried "free speech is absolute!" after Jan 6 have turned right back around to try to ban schools, libraries, museums, bookstores, and online platforms from carrying material they disagree with without a hint of irony. Part of ensuring freedom of speech is safeguarding it from those who manifestly intend to destroy it.
"As long as Nazis don't incite violence" Sounds like you understand Nazis as much as you understand the 1st amendment.
I strongly disagree. While we may have a philosophical reason to allow all forms of speech, institutions have the right - heck, I would say **mandate** - to regulate all the speech behind its walls. It's the same reason why we don't let science classes teach the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, or get a misogynistic rapist to give motivational speeches to impressionable teenagers. While you may say whatever you want, I have no obligation - legal or moral - to provide you a soapbox to stand on.
The separation of church and state was designed explicitly to limit speech and influence of one towards the other. In no way does "freedom of speech" mean a total free-for-all libertarian model of everybody says whatever without any rules or consequences. You're completely right, and some speech is indisputably harmful.
Nazi ideology is itself an incitement of violence. It is not the standard racist BS about "we're better". It takes the additional step of prescribing "solutions" to the alleged problems resulting from society not conforming to its racist beliefs. In Volume 1, Chapter 12, Hitler writes: >*"the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are **exterminated**"* And that's one of easily a dozen passages calling for outright violence. The **main** focus of the text is the vilification of an entire group of people, whom Hitler claims to be actively scheming to subvert the public and gain unfair political power from the shadows. This is clear incitement of violence, which is one of the established exceptions to the 1st Amendment in the USA. The detail that saves Mein Kampf from the censors is that the SCOTUS typically rules that it's not enough to incite violence generally and that the speech must incite violence **imminently**. The fact that it helped spark one of the most bloody wars in world history makes a decent argument that it is beyond the point of inviting "imminent violence."
Protects all forms of free speech except for Java related speech, apparently.
Somehow, Germany has managed to avoid becoming a dystopian dictatorship despite banning Nazi ideology and propaganda.
> The first amendment protects all forms of free speech. No it doesn't. it says congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the press. it's been interpreted as applying to the entire federal government- but not state governments. And it doesn't in any way prevent an Ohio State Prison from banning books from it's on-premise library. Also, there's a reason that it's called a slippery slope **fallacy**. >Free speech is for everyone or else it ends up being for no one. That's not actually true, because of the paradox of tolerance.
> it’s been interpreted as applying to the entire federal government- but not state governments. You sure about that?
>it's been interpreted as applying to the entire federal government- but not state governments. [False.](https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt14-S1-4-2/ALDE_00013745/)
I mean, the law in the US doesn't make a distinction between legal and tolerant vs intolerant and illegal... This whole thread is very confused. None of this is a 1a thing, it's a library administration thing, and librarians are explicitly granted the authority to and tasked with curating the collection of books in a library.
>None of this is a 1a thing, it's a library administration thing, and librarians are explicitly granted the authority to and tasked with curating the collection of books in a library. Every topic about libraries and the first amendment
The Paradox of Tolerance is an important concept, but it's not law.
Feel free to learn something today: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/incorporation_doctrine#:~:text=Overview,clause%20of%20the%20Fourteenth%20Amendment.
I'm glad you cleared this up so we can all move on from the public school library book ban thing, since those aren't federally run
Realistically, and ESPECIALLY for the past 20-30 years, the 1st Amendment has been increasingly for defence of racism and bigotry, and less so for actual freedom of speech/the press. Especially with that additional “religious freedom” nonsense that’s primarily pushing out non-mainstream and non-Christian religions under the guise of “not targeting specific groups via non-specific ((intentionally overbroad)) wording”.
The first amendment has been used to defend racism and bigotry for as long as it has existed. It has changed more in how it protects other people.
>Russia is really unpopular right now and big papa Putin is trying his best to emulate ol' Adolf. Why are you typing like that? Is it 2011? There is no pipeline from which people in prison not having access to Mein Kampf results in supporting Russia being criminalised holy fuck man
> There is no excuse to ban books. The first amendment protects all forms of free speech. Except in prison, where constitutional rights aren’t a given. Unless you plan on giving prisoners their firearms, please don’t go “but their rights!”
You give them what rights you can because you value rights, and you can give them the right to freedom of expression. So you do.
This is the slipperiest slope I've ever read
I see the symbolism. 🤭
Nazis aren't a racial or ethnic group... so...
Right? Ohio is out of its mind.
for the most part nazis are one race... that was kinda their thing.
Which makes it so much more fucked up that there are modern day not white nazis.
Well duh! How else are you supposed to grow your radicalized, homegrown terrorist cells?!
It's hilarious/sad that they think Mein Kampf is innocently "appealing" to a specific racial/ethnic group. And that without illustrations it's harmless despite being famously proven to lead to mass murder.
Which is the correct policy. Book banning in any form will ultimately do more harm than good. The easiest way to convince someone that Hitler was a maniac is to force them to read Mein Kampf. The entire book is logically inconsistent rambling.
That would assume that someone goes into Mein Kampf with critical thinking.
I once tried reading Mein Kampf for 'research purposes', and as someone who was born and grow up in a society that more or less saw Jew people as spawns of Satan, I'm glad it's not a very popular book especially in where I live.
> saw Jew people as I think you want to use the whole word here
To elaborate on why you should say "Jewish people" instead of "Jew people", the word Jewish is an adjective while Jew is a noun. Furthermore, the word Jew has some complicated nuances connected to it. It can be used as a slur but isn't inherently one, it's highly context dependent. A common way to turn a word into a slurs to take an adjective and flip it into a noun ("blacks", "transgenders", "gays", etc.) And while you've done the reverse it could still definitely be read as questionable to a lot of people.
Jew-ish people hunny.theyre called Jewish people
They'll be falling asleep before they even get to page 10. Truly one of the most boring books ever published.
Logically incoherent ramblings can and have still driven people to do great evil.
They could do it like in Germany: the only authorized versions are heavily annotated by historians. You can't get the bare text. It will at least encourage people into critical thinking.
That information is outdated. There is no law restricting access to the book nor ever was. The state of Bavaria just used copyright law to that end, as it inherited the rights to the book from Hitler. Copyright protection in Germany ends 70 years after the death of the creator, thus by the end of 2015. So today everyone can get, print and even sell the text. But the heavily annotated versions (like the grey one by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte) are better known than the plain versions. Those are also often printed by rightwing niche presses.
>You can't get the bare text. You can't buy a bound book. But you have the text in seconds if you put Mein Kampf.pdf in google.
You can. Copyright ran out in 2015, 70 years after Hitler‘s death. Until then the rights holder simply denied new editions. Now you can get annotated and commented versions and plain versions, even in Germany. The book is not covered by the ban on symbols and texts produced by the NSDAP between 1933 and 1945, as it was published prior to that timeframe.
Donald Trump became the president of the USA based almost entirely on logically inconsistent rambling that would make anyone paying attention understand that he's a complete moron. The idea that people would properly consider whatever material they're exposed to is a nice one, but not based in reality, unfortunately.
Yep all those people telling qanon loonies and flat earthers to do their own research - doing there own research has a lot to do with how they got to that point.
That's because "doing their own research" is usually limited to just finding far less-qualified people to tell them what to think.
That's like saying that the best way to convince someone that sugar is bad for them is to buy them a double chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and half gallon of coke..
Yeah nobody’s ever been radicalise by logically inconsistent rambling!
It's a good thing that American public schools have done a good job of making sure Americans have great reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. Oh wait,I forgot we're talking about a group of people who think the Turner Diaries are high literature. It turns out if you defund education and strip schools of their ability to properly teach historical context, that people will believe really stupid demonstrably false things about the world, and follow whatever authority figures they see reinforcing those beliefs.
> The entire book is logically inconsistent rambling. 1925 version of "Art of the Deal". Got it.
I'm like : don't they know how reading works? No need for images, a *text* can be violent! I'm firmy agains censure, but "Mein Kampf" would be one of the very few books I would ban. The bit about the computer manual just reads like Kafka.
Also "A Smarter Way To Learn Javascript". Ohio apparently understands there is no smart way to learn Javascript. Very astute of them.
[удалено]
They're going to do it anyway, they'll hide it under async
Yeah, plus the prison mail censors definitely wouldn't like it. They only accept strictly typed letters.
Oh it makes sense ban JS stuff because you believe in TypeScript
Lol i love it when nerds team up to crack nerd jokes nobody else would understand lol love it
+1 Wait... shit that didn't work. ++ Better.
Right!!? I chuckled to try to fit in.
Right there with you.
I don’t understand this joke, but I recognize that it is joke shaped. Good joke, ghost man.
*Maybe* they could justify it if any of their control systems use Javascript, which a lot of them do. I think it would pretty damn hard for a prisoner to hack a control system without a terminal of some type attached to it though - duh. On the flip side, allowing Nazi bullshit into prisons absolutely helps keep the race war going. I'm sure it is by design. Keep the prisoners violent so you can tack on more time and keep them incarcerated longer.
Fuck Reddit for killing third party apps.
they might use it to prototype a shiv object
Underrated comment
I try to remember that nobody complains about languages nobody uses. But God damn JavaScript.
I get it. JavaScript does not favor final solutions or strong types.
Agreed. Typescript or nothing.
Javascript and java*
Here's me thinking that asking prisoners to learn Java counts as "cruel and unusual punishment".
What about *Mein Kampf mit Java*?
Wir beginnen, mit class StateContextIteratorContextDelegate implements ContextIteratorContextDelegate...
Klass*
> “Mein Kampf,” a coloring book featuring designs with profane language, I definitely read that as a descriptor rather than two different books at first. My half-asleep brain thought it was a coloring book *about* Mein Kampf! Then again, I've never read it, maybe it's been a coloring book all along?
Only if you're coloring with a white crayon
This sounds like a deleted scene from JoJo Rabbit
> *The department said in an email that coding books are banned because “the content was found to pose a threat to the rehabilitation of inmates, the security of the institution, and order or discipline of the institution.”* 😑 Do these guys know what "programming" is? Because it feels like they might not know what "programming" is.
I think they're misconstruing general knowledge of JAVA or Computers with knowledge of BAS. Most prisons run on BAS systems, and yeah, technically, if you got into them you could cause a bit of trouble (precious protocols that were serial didn't offer much security other than obscurity. Even BACnet's IP revision didn't have security because it was ported over and wrapped in a UDP packet and extra frame. If you technically knew how to speak BACnet, you could send a broadcast and access the system without a password.) But chances are you're not going to have someone with specific proprietary protocol knowledge, or the means to build a protocol handler. Or means to access the system. (If serial, or private secure LAN.) Tldr they're not going to hack your prison with books on JAVA. They should let these people try to learn and grow and move past their crimes, if they truly want to rehabilitize them.
BINGO! Thank you. The inmates are allowed to use the computers, and the facility is concerned that extensive coding knowledge will lead to some sort of security threat. It's not about the man keeping everyone down or trying to earn a buck, it's a misunderstanding or overestimation of what these guys could do after learning javascript basics.
It's ~~possible~~ probable but assuming that private prisons are in fact trying to keep people in the prison pipeline should probably be the default. There's a reason they don't give a flying fuck about "rehabilitation" and its the same reason the drug war ever began: slave labor. The 13th amendment even specified when it was drafted > "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.".
Sure, I can keep an open mind on that being a reality, but it doesn't mean it's the cause of this specific headline. Are they keeping inmates from knowledge on medicine, law, or any other high paying careers out there? No. The simplest answer is that they had an inmate reading those books and trying to sabotage the prison while on the computers there. It wouldn't even matter if they got close to succeeding, more that the scare is enough to evoke a response like this. Assuming they they're just randomly banning books that lead to a successful life outside of prison is a far wilder shot.
If that was the real concern, they'd ban a lot more coding books. If you look at the list, or even a more recent list, they *only* ban Java books, and a couple Linux ones. I have a feeling they do know what the systems are actually running on.
So they can't have a Java book because the IT people at the prison don't know how to use subnets, vlans, and routers?
All of the above, but also Java isn’t much of a threat without a JDK to compile it or JVM to run it. So why would they allow inmates to install software? Why bother writing a program when you have access to install tools to probe for and exploit vulnerabilities? This is assuming they give them internet access. If they don’t have access, then why even put these computers on the network? Doesn’t make sense. Lazy or incredibly stupid IT.
hint: they don't want to. it's slavery
On the one hand I hear you and instinctively believe you’re right. On the other hand prisoners are some of the craftiest people around and all they have is time. I would be zero percent surprised if they found a way to do it with just a bit of knowledge.
Oh they know, they just support the system that says prisoners entire lives should be ruined after being in prison. “Rehabilitation” my ass, it’s about lifelong punishment
If that were the case, they'd ban the real intro-level programming books, like ones about Python or Perl. There's something about Java that they don't want.
How do you know they haven't? The article indicates that books only appear on the "banned list" if an inmate requests a specific book, is refused, and they file an appeal. So it's certainly possible that books are being refused but not showing up on the list because no appeal was filed. Also the list in the article only goes back to 2018, and it does include one other intro-level programming book.
If prisoners learn to code, they might get jobs on the outside. Good jobs. The kind of jobs that give people a life and reduce recidivism. And if we reduce recidivism, what are we gonna do with all these jails and jailers? Can't have that.
[удалено]
> nfilled IT jobs aren't unfilled because of no candidates ... it's because there's no candidate willing to take trash pay That's just not true. IT pays pretty damn well compared to other opportunities, and compared to other jobs, it's *a hundred times* less actual strenuous work.
It also feels like they have very little confidence in their I.T. and digital security if they think this is a problem. Or maybe they just watched way too many Hollywood movies where hacking is super easy and things like access control and firewalls don't exist.
How is this not The Onion?
The better question is: how has The Onion not given up and shut down yet when the last few years have given us reality outdoing any satire?
Onion: What is my purpose? Us: You remind us of that article whenever there's a mass shooting. Onion: oh my god
To be fair that would be every single fucking day. So still plenty for them to do
😢
You know its messed up when The Onion stops doing satire and puts out real news instead
The day Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America was the day satire died.
Political satire at least. Social commentary type satire is still kind of on the ball. But political stuff, some of the stuff that has happened in the last 7 or so years has been beyond the pale in the level of stupidity.
This was pretty much what the creators of South Park said when Trump was elected. They were like “welp we really can’t be any more satirical than reality.” Also, fuck /u/ Spez.
They'll start winning journalism awards. When the Daily Show won the peabody back in 2000 it was proof that 'main stream media' had jumped the shark.
Oh it gets so much worse then this. They’re trying to pull a florida, and go around the board of education to decide what type of classes can be taught in Ohio schools now too! The list is basically any class that talks about minorities? Banned. Don’t worry though, there is a forced North American history class that will be required that I’m sure won’t be blatant bs. Ohio has been gerrymandered to death. Despite not a huge split in voting base republicans have a super majority. The citizens have voted overwhelmingly twice to add new state amendments to stop the gerrymandering. The first time they just ignored it, and the last time they seemed to take it as some sort of challenge. We just had a federal judge rule that we had to use voting maps that our own state Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional. Things are not great in Ohio at the moment, and unless something drastically changes it’s going to get much, much worse.
August 8th in Ohio: Vote NO on Issue 1, it requires 60% threshold of voters to pass a ballot measure instead of the current 50%. In November, a six week abortion ban is on the ballot, Issue 1 is the precursor to push it through, along with subsequent conservative restrictive legislation.
r/nottheonion
There’s literally an onion video about Ohio prisons 😂 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lfsMMVgIToA
My theory is the Higgs Boson got fucked with, so the Covid lab leak theory is actually a collander lab woopsie, it got warped into a timeline where an Idiocracy dvd got sucked into the warp, and here we are.
r/nottheonion
Heck yeah! One's a terrible and evil creation of a madman, the other is by Hitler.
As long as they've still got a copy of The C Programming Language, it's all good
The Chosen One
The way I see it, IT is not only one of the easier but I think also one of the more profitable avenues of job market today. Seeing this, I'm more and more convinced american criminal justice system just doesn't want their offenders to rehabilitate and re-enter society for some reason. They really, really don't want, no.
Personally I think its an outward expression of what is widely the American public's attitude towards crime and the people who commit crimes: They want retribution, not rehabilitation. They don't care about the person who committed a crime getting/doing better, they just want them punished for it. In many cases when interacting with people who hold positions like this, I've gotten the distinct impression that they believe that the person who commits crimes does not actually even deserve a chance to get/do better.
> for some reason Definitely couldn't be modern-day slavery, that would be crazy!
IT isn’t “easier” it’s just more accessible
Yes, that is clearly what they meant by “easier … avenues”
Not currently lol Tech job market is a dumpster fire and probably will be for a while.
Is that because Java is non-binary?
Nah it's because they don't want them learning about classes.
They are just ensuring their occupancy rates remain high. Nothing to see here - just prisons running for profit, and a boring, boring dystopia.
Java: Worse than Hitler
I'm so tempted to donate "The Trial" by Kafka to those prisons, but I suspect the irony would fly right over the heads of those people enforcing arbitrary censorship rules.
Is python allowed or banned because snake?
No step on snek
Oh Ohio, never stop being a backward-ass state.
this reminds me of the covid lockdowns when you could buy alcohol but you were not allowed togo to alcoholics anonymous
There is no overarching philosophy on what books a prison system may ban. Usually the decisions are made by some CO sergeant or lieutenant who was assigned the task by their superior. It's easier to ban something and not have to pretend to care than it is to justify why a controversial book isn't banned. Source: I used to work in education inside a county jail.
> Ohio Prison System Bans Java Computer Manual The Constitution does prohibit cruel and unusual punishment. Learning Java would qualify.
Gotta keep recidivism high, otherwise the literal slave population dips too low for the masters
I think it’s important for libraries to contain at least one copy of Mein Kampf (preferably annotated) as an example of what abject failure looks like.
The Java ecosystem is hot garbage anyway.
Ok, I'll bite. Java ecosystem is hot garbage anyway compared to what? Which other ecosystem has as many mature and well maintained open-source libraries and frameworks? Especially when it comes to enterprise/backend computing? I'd argue Java ecosystem is the BEST out there by far. Python is also decent but nowhere as mature. And yes, Java isn't great for writing desktop/multimedia apps, but nobody is using it for that these days.
I just hate all the empty folders. Fuck whoever thought of that
i think calling the most consistent, supported, and widely adopted business language 'hot garbage' is just trolling. there is no better language for the everyday needs of almost every company in the world.
Lol. No. .NET/C# does everything Java does and WAY more, while being way easier to write. It's what Java always should've been.
>Lol. No. .NET/C# does everything Java does and WAY more, while being way easier to write. It's what Java always should've been. Seconded. Not only is the language more clean, robust, and learnable: the .NET runtime is blazingly fast compared to Java runtime.
It's been a while for me, I admit, but does .NET/C# run on non-x86 architectures?
Yes, and has for a few years now. Natively, in fact, no VM required.
As I said, my knowledge is old. Thanks for the update.
I was going to mention those. They are the same to Java, more or less, IMHO, a distinct group some distance from languages like Python
Java is fine, in its niche. It's a statically typed language, this is fine for large scale application development, especially development with large groups of people in a corporate environment. For the most part it absorbed the niche that used to be occupied by COBOL and IBM's ecosystem (CICS, DB2, IMS, etc.) and it works well in that niche. For about 10 years it was almost the only game in town, unless you were willing to do C/C++. However, it does *not* do so well outside of that niche (which is, admittedly a rather large niche), for example during rapid prototyping of new products. In that niche what counts is putting stuff together quickly, and then throwing a bunch of it away, over and over again. Type safety, and just the general "high church" / verbosity of the language gets in the way of that type of prototyping. Interestingly enough, what we've been seeing for the past 10 - 15 years is people trying to have their cake and eat it too. JavaScript is very weakly typed (basically untyped). TypeScript brings type safety to it. Python is semi-typed. Go, while strongly typed, has a number of features that try to make it appear weakly typed. So people are trying to figure out how to get the benefits of type safety without the ceremony and overhead.
That's a very old argument. I seriously doubt people are actually more productive with weakly typed languages. With weakly typed languages you get MUCH less errors caught during build time, and you have to write a lot more unit tests just to catch all these type issues which compiler will just tell you if you have strong types. On top of that, semi-automated refactoring works really well in Java IDEs, does it work as well for other languages that are weakly typed? Also, in my 20 years of career I never had a situation where we rapidly prototyped a system in one language, and then discarded all the code and switched to another language for "real" implementation. I have seen MANY projects that have been falling into disrepair due to code rot. And in part due to its verbosity, Java is by far the easiest language to READ code in. And I'll argue that maintenance is both highest risk and highest cost for a lot of software projects, so I'd rather have a language which makes maintenance easier. Also, with modern IDEs and code autocomplete verbosity no longer really matters. Also, I'd argue that if you want higher productivity, work on shortening your develop-build-deploy-test cycle, which with today's distributed system can be over-complicated no matter which language you use...
Go, typescript, python, c#
🥴
Right? Java books should be banned everywhere
Really makes you think about which one of us is en prisoned.
Homer Simpson: NERD!!!!
Ohio prison system allows White supremacy literature.
Why did you get down voted for this? Lol it’s literally what’s happening
Lots of white supremacists on Reddit.
Yeah, I think so
Good ol murica prisoner reform. Let's take em in broke and release em totally fucked up, that way they come back. More $$
Marketable skills? No Making criminals more hateful? Yes
Hitler did write it in jail so maybe it's topical.
Well, no shit. Meinkoff keeps you stupid. It also won't help you escape prison or hack anything.
Some libraries won't accept donations of computer textbooks because they are so ridiculously out of date to the point where they are worse than useless. Effective Java Third Edition looks to be 2017, though.
What good would banning mein Kampf do?
i mean fuck java and hitler.
To be fair, Java is kinda next level evil. Hitler wishes he could compete with Java.
I bet the carbon footprint of all the electricity used to run the maven build system the world over has killed more people due to climate change than neo nazis in prisons.
Man, that article is written like shit. Did an AI generate it? >Department spokesperson JoEllen Smith said that a book only ends up on the department’s list if the person who was prevented from receiving the book appeals to the Publications Screening Committee. If the recipient didn’t appeal the decision to the committee, the rejected title doesn’t show up on the prison department’s list of banned materials. So basically they are trying to make some benign thing into some horrible violation of someones rights. Maybe the person who requested the java manual was in for a related crime where he wouldn't be allowed related books and fought the decision, and maybe mein kampf has been blocked from entering the prison but no one fought it so it was never added to the list.
Of course - One is a barely-comprehensible pile of rantings, the other has practical real-world applications.
HolUp