@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I haven't heard anyone claim that DeSantis is not, among the many, banning books many people would agree are pornographic. We are arguing that his dragnet is sweeping up a whole lot else as well. I guess I don't see it. You don't like that his critics really don't care about the so-called pornography-in-schools problem, so don't praise him or much acknowledge that he is also doing what he claims. 1/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock But that's because we don't see much value making a crusade of pornography in schools, even when it occasionally hits a valid target. No one denies that it sometimes does! But we argue, correctly I think, that the collateral damage vastly outweighs whatever benefit there is in that (and we see very little benefit in that, because we don't think porn in schools is a big problem). 2/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock It would be in bad faith to, say, claim that DeSantis is intentionally going after literature while trying to absolve porn. I've never heard anyone argue any such thing. We think (1) the porn problem is overrated; (2) lots of stuff DeSantis' base would consider porn has literary, political, or artistic merit, and DeSantis is unconcerned if his bans overreach into that stuff too, if it helps him politically. I don't think those are claims in bad faith. /fin

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I guess I'd submit to you that, living in Florida and having some connections here, there's a pattern to the choices our governor has been making recently that are not consistent with "a person trying to govern well who sometimes makes mistakes", but are much more consistent with "a person using state power to take extreme sides in certain kinds of controversies, indifferent to the harms that it causes". 1/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This is relatively new — for most of DeSantis' first term, he did in fact mostly build support by governing pretty well, making common cause especially with municipal officials across partisan lines. The controversy that surrounded him was over COVID, where, rightly or wrongly, most Floridians thought he chose well by erring on the side of individual liberty rather than community safety. 2/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock But current DeSantis is, literally, looking for certain kinds of trouble. It does in a way play to him, to make so strong an issue of controversies over book banning, because he is trying to make himself a champion for social conservatives, and any press there is good press. He solicited, then signed a 6-week abortion ban, is effectively banning gender-affirmative care for kids, whatever their parents think, and putting severe barriers for consenting trans adults. 3/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock You can accuse me, correctly, of having a personal stake in this. He is destroying the experimental college that gave me the richest years of my life, overtly trying to remake it using a conservative Christian college as a model, on the theory that it is too "woke" (I'm sure there's some of that, but it's mostly experimental and transgressive.) 4/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock In my view, DeSantis is a person not without talents, but he is a person who has self-consciously decided to deploy those talents in a manner indifferent to what would have been his own conception of the public good until very recently, because he is trying to make a case for himself to a Republican primary base. In doing so, he is doing a very great deal of harm, but does not care. 5/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Sometimes it is wise to steelman. But as Dan Davies (quoted here on Mastodon today!) used to point out *ad hominem* argument is a bad habit, but so is credulously and laboriously taking at face value the arguments of people with a history of acting in bad faith. In my view, Ron DeSantis is a person who has demonstrated a very great deal of bad faith. (A year ago, I was interested in and somewhat open to him.) /fin

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Because most of us think the book is probably fine for high schools. Genuinely. We are with the Miller definition that includes as a criterion "whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value". A book that addresses controversies about and the experience of gender and sexual minorities may well meet that test, despite a few pages of graphical depictions of sex. 1/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I'm glad to say it shouldn't be in elementary schools. And I wouldn't be outraged if public schools were more vigilant about narrowly excluding just this kind of thing, I'd consider it understandable.

I could turn that question around. I see very few people who consider the presence of books like this in the library to be an important problem making any effort to ensure that the scope of removals is surgically narrow. Why is that? /fin