Interesting Links for 29-03-2026

[andrewducker]

1. What did Tolkien actually say about fantasy and escapism?

(tags:Tolkien fantasy UrsulaKLegGuin )

2. Greater Manchester school library censorship: who is accountable?

(tags:religion Christianity school Manchester UK censorship OhForFucksSake )

3. Mutually Assured Energy Destruction (and why it hasn't happened just yet)

(tags:middle_east Iran oil doom USA war )

4. 350 cameras in the US wilderness produce some amazing footage

(tags:nature animals video awesome )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

"To Kill a Mockingbird" banned again!
"Frankenstein", bad for 16-year-olds, written by a 16-year-old girl...

I wonder if there are muslim schools, and what they have there... probably just one book, teaching to kill all Others.

[andrewducker]

There are Muslim schools in the UK, and like the absolutely vast majority of Muslims in the UK they are perfectly reasonable and decent people and no different to anyone else.

[juan_gandhi]

Good people, ok. Do they read "Macbeth" or "To Kill the Mocking Bird"? or "Frankenstein"? In all three, females play too much of a role.

[andrewducker]

They'll have to follow the national curriculum like everyone else.

[juan_gandhi]

Oh, I didn't know that. Then the same rules apply to that Catholic school, I guess.

[andrewducker]

Yup. And thankfully this kind of school censorship is rare enough that it makes national news.

[greenwoodside]

2. Hope this doesn't turn into a trend. On the bright side, with librarianship generally paying peanuts, especially school librarianship, it tends not to attract the kind of ambitious people who'd hold a book burning day if they thought it would get them points with their academy's chief executive.

But I'm sure that censorship does happen regularly in the UK, though mostly less consciously. Right-wing Yorkshire-pudding-brained mumsnetters doing the regular weeding that has to happen in every library maybe removing some newer material that offends their sense of decency.

I've been guilty of a version of this myself. A number of years ago I nudged the boss into withdrawing an abstinence-only Christian sex-ed book from the stock in a college library. Apparently there'd previously been a library assistant employed there who was part of a hardcore Pentecostal Christian group.

[greenwoodside]

Also, 1 had a nicer explanation than I normally expect from dodgy quotes that float around SM.

"Turns out the quote isn't from that titan of 20th century fiction. It's from this one instead."

Much nicer than it turning out to have been written by a marketing executive from Delaware.