http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-08-2010/banned__.html

Here's a list of 50 banned books, some of the best literature and most important science.  Check it out.

http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-08-2010/banned__.html

Here's a list of 50 banned books, some of the best literature and most important science.  Check it out.


"Jaws" had too much sex? ???

I am guessing that the movie did not faithfully follow the book.  ;D

"Jaws" had too much sex? ???

I am guessing that the movie did not faithfully follow the book.   ;D


American Association of Real Perverts!  If you didn't see it, they did!

So, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a political book.  Orwell, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Steinbeck are all deemed "too political."  No Ayn Rand up there, though!  I think I know where these retrograde geezers are coming from.  They're the ones with the velvet portraits of Ronald Reagan!
:D

How much sex is too much?
Any.

"Jaws" had too much sex? ???

I am guessing that the movie did not faithfully follow the book.   ;D


Before they go after the shark the oceanographer boinks the sheriff's wife.

Don Carlos's doctoral thesis:

"Jaws: A Freudian Analysis"

:D

Banned Books Week is September 25th to October 2

http://www.northernsun.com/images/imagelarge/I-Read-Banned-Books-Button-(0087).jpg

Banned Books Week is September 25th to October 2

http://www.northernsun.com/images/imagelarge/I-Read-Banned-Books-Button-(0087).jpg


One of the most banned books in right-wing America:
http://truereligiondebate.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/bible3.gif

They don't get to read that filth anywhere else, why should they get to read it in the Bible?  And this Jesus guy in the New Testament -- they make him look like some kind of commie peacenik.  It's that liberal Nicene bias showing through again!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/12/grommit.gif

I've read approx 50% of the books on that list, and some of you here have probably read more than I.  Guess I should set my eyes on fire for reading that filth. ;)

So, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a political book.  Orwell, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Steinbeck are all deemed "too political."  No Ayn Rand up there, though!


That's because nobody could read through Atlas Shrugged without wanting to fall asleep during the 200-page speech at the end, where Galt re-encapsulates everything Rand had been saying for the first 700 pages.  Harmless!

(I'd actually recommend Rand's Anthem as a short story.  Pretty much the seed from which Atlas Shrugged sprouted, but tight enough to be readable in an hour.  Although Vonnegut did it better with Harrison Bergeron, which is also a must-read)

No books should be banned, but as long as I've just committed thoughtcrime, I've got nothing to lose by suggesting that 1984 and Animal Farm should be read as a trilogy, with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in between.  Doesn't matter whether the Party rules with the iron fist of IngSoc's surveillance state, the velvet glove of Bread and Circuses (By Ford, fmy grandparents called it Bread and Circuses, and in my day we called it Junk Food and American Idol), or in the interests of the Glorious People's Revolution.

1984 is worth a re-read every 5 years, if for no other reasons than that it takes only a couple of hours to read it, and you can look at your penciled-in notes of "Invented/legalized/implemented in 19xx/20xx".  And you will find something new every time you read it.  Thank you, Orwell, for showing us how the game is played, and curse you, Orwell, for writing the functional specification for the modern surveillance state. 

That's because nobody could read through Atlas Shrugged without wanting to fall asleep during the 200-page speech at the end, where Galt re-encapsulates everything Rand had been saying for the first 700 pages.  Harmless!

(I'd actually recommend Rand's Anthem as a short story.  Pretty much the seed from which Atlas Shrugged sprouted, but tight enough to be readable in an hour.  Although Vonnegut did it better with Harrison Bergeron, which is also a must-read)

No books should be banned, but as long as I've just committed thoughtcrime, I've got nothing to lose by suggesting that 1984 and Animal Farm should be read as a trilogy, with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in between.  Doesn't matter whether the Party rules with the iron fist of IngSoc's surveillance state, the velvet glove of Bread and Circuses (By Ford, fmy grandparents called it Bread and Circuses, and in my day we called it Junk Food and American Idol), or in the interests of the Glorious People's Revolution.

1984 is worth a re-read every 5 years, if for no other reasons than that it takes only a couple of hours to read it, and you can look at your penciled-in notes of "Invented/legalized/implemented in 19xx/20xx".  And you will find something new every time you read it.  Thank you, Orwell, for showing us how the game is played, and curse you, Orwell, for writing the functional specification for the modern surveillance state.  


Orwell's legacy continues.  Everybody from Greg Palast to Glenn Beck wants to cop Orwell to push their own agenda.  Eric Blair prophesied Glenn Beck.  It's the Two Minutes Hate.  Keith Olbermann has a segment of Countdown called "World's Worst Person."  Then at the end the camera comes back to dear old Keith.  Again, never mind the politics, it's just a bit creepy, that's all!
:o

Orwell observed Hitler was made powerful by radio.  He saw Hitler as the first real telecom dictators.  He took Big Brother more from Stalin's persona.  The Five-Year Plans come from Mao.  Is this to say Orwell was anti-communist.  Well, he was.  He liked economic leftism with a progressive social approach.  What Orwell is showing us here is how easy it is to manipulate people.  

Or from Monty Python:

I am Arthur, King of the Britons!'
King of the Who?
The Britons.  We are all Britons and I am your king.
King, eh? How did you become king then...

That's, of course, emblematic of the liberal response to imposed authority.  Why should I obey you?  Monty Python's historical veracity aside, in almost all human history, questioning authority was unthinkable.  First the boss will think you're nuts.  Then, he kicks you in the nuts and tell you to keep marching!

Christ got crucified. Sir Thomas Moore got decapitated and Gandhi got shot.  So much for that.  

And so you see when you have a government that doesn't feel it owes you much of an explanation via some divine/secular providence, time to get it the hell OUT of there or you won't have democracy anymore.

Orwell was unequivocally a leftist.  However, his understanding of how mass media would be used against the people is beyond politics and seems more prescient ever year that goes by.
::)

OH, and BTW, when liberals DO get power they use it just like everybody else!

^ WOW.  That doesn't make much sense. 
8)

^ WOW.  That doesn't make much sense.  
8)


Maybe it's just the beer talking (you should see my post over there in the 80s board!), but it makes more sense than anything else that passes for politics these days.  The thing I really liked about 1984 is that...

SPOILER ALERT (then again, if you haven't read the book, it won't make much sense until you get to the relevant passages, so maybe there's no harm in saying it)

Goldstein didn't exist either.  He was a fabrication of the Inner Party, but "his" book really was the operating instructions for how the Inner Party was to work.  They used it as a means of detecting Outer Party members like Winston and Julia - who wouldn't join - and, I speculate, as a recruitment guide for those who could read it and say "Yeah, that's a pretty cool idea, how do I get in on that?" (which is not the same as "Yeah, that's a pretty cool idea, and it beats Room 101")

I really don't think Orwell knew the extent to which it would end up being used as a HOWTO guide, but he wrote one anyways.  The supreme irony of 1984 is that Orwell became the real-world Goldstein: on one level, he's the antagonist of the Inner Party, but on a deeper level, he's the one who set down in print the rules by which the Inner Party lives, and gave aspiring Inner Party members everything the needed to know to sign up.

OK, serious spoiler alert.  If you haven't read the book, stop reading now and just click on the link, and don't come back until you've read the bloody book.


The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.  Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.  What pure power means you will understand presently.  We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.  They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end.  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution.  The object of torture is torture.  The object of power is power.


Then again, maybe he knew damn well he was writing a HOWTO (how'd that URL from tomorrow morning's NYTimes get in there?), and he did it anyways, just for the lulz, because he knew that no matter how much hope and change got waved around, it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference.

The funny part is that the people current in the Tea Party are the ones that gave - demanded - that President Cheney make it legal.  Everyone who had a problem with that sort of thing (and who often voiced their concerns with questions in the form of "What if someone from the Jackass wing of the Party had that power?") was purged from the Elephant Wing of the Party back in the early 2000s. 

Hope. Change. Lulz. And, of course, the squirrels.

My father said in the 1992 election, "They're out of money and they're out of lies."

He was wrong. 

They're never out of lies.  They found think tanks to make up bigger and better lies.  As long as they have lies, they can make sh!t up about money too.  That translates to power.  The political elites for the past 30 years have been saying quite openly rich people have money because they're righteous and they're righteous because they have money and therefore we should worship them and let them run the country.

That's what Glenn Beck is all about.  He's an Emanuel Goldstein character.  He rails against the "elites" when he's really a tool to keep the real elites in charge.  In Beck's book, I'm elitist.  I might be poor, but I'm still elitist.  Why?  I think about things and ask questions. 
::)

"Jaws" had too much sex? ???

I am guessing that the movie did not faithfully follow the book.   ;D

It doesn't have a large amount in, but it is fairly graphic.  Come to think of it (no, not in *that* way), I think it was the first sex scene I read, back when I was just about a teenager.
But Madame Bovary?  I'm surprised anyone stayed away long enough while reading it to notice that it had any sex in.


I've read approx 50% of the books on that list, and some of you here have probably read more than I.  Guess I should set my eyes on fire for reading that filth. ;)

I'm at around 50%, too

It doesn't have a large amount in, but it is fairly graphic.  Come to think of it (no, not in *that* way), I think it was the first sex scene I read, back when I was just about a teenager.
But Madame Bovary?  I'm surprised anyone stayed away long enough while reading it to notice that it had any sex in.
I'm at around 50%, too



When we had to read Madame Bovary in High school, we nicknamed it "Madame ovaries"  ;D

When we had to read Madame Bovary in High school, we nicknamed it "Madame ovaries"  ;D


Yes, yes, and the Sale of Two Titties!