Updated 2 years ago
If you support free speech, and rail against censorship of racist /far-right speech by big tech, yet also support banning certain books you don’t like, you are a hypocrite.
And with book banning perennially in the news, people should keep one thing in mind.
We should just be happy if kids are reading books. Any book. I don’t care. Anarchist Cookbook, the Satanic Bible, Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Necronomicon. Trashy romance novels. Porn lit. Trump’s ghostwritten memoirs.
The Diary of Anne Frank, such blatant LGBTQ propaganda:
Reading is in a way an inverted benefit of free speech. The answer to “bad” free speech is more free speech. And because reading leads to more reading, and the net result is they are being educated more and more.
Clicking things on your smartphone just isn’t the same – it lacks an evolving context. A staccato series of ADHD freeze frames. TikTok takes that to unhealthy extremes. And let’s be honest, even watching simple Youtube just spoonfeeds you prefabricated ideologies – you are merely soaking in someone else’s interpretation rather than making it your own.
Nothing can really replace the alchemy of you creating images, scenarios and narratives in your head from mere words. And no CGI film can ever match your imagination.
This is why books are ALWAYS better than film adaptations.
Reading is the best.
