« Whatever happened to "Crazy"? | Main | The Problem With Conservative Inc. »

May 25, 2014

The Library is one of those institutions

through which the Radical Left has been making its long march - - €”with absolutely no resistance. 
Its directors take it as axiomatic that Left is right. Anything hip, cool, feminist, queer, LGBT, black, iconoclastic, multicultural, Left-leaning, or not-so-quiet gets the OK. Whatever is not any of those things does not even exist.  A building dedicated to the achievements of Homer, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, and other eminent writers must now accommodate the pretentious junk promoted by "hip-hop artists."
-- Thinking Housewife

Posted by gerardvanderleun at May 25, 2014 1:58 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

I have never taken my kids to the library. I used it, to get books for our home school, but I didn't let them choose what to read when they were young. I filled our shelves with the best of the best, and added to our library over the years. It is sad, as I remember happy times as a kid, going to the library and checking out the maximum. The left is insidious.

Posted by: Leslie at May 25, 2014 3:42 PM

It is very hard to find anything written before 1980 in a library these days, no matter how great a classic it was. However, your mileage may vary. Some are much better than others.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at May 25, 2014 5:42 PM

All seem to be following the script by Orwell in 1984. Rewrite history. The Soviet Union made persons go away, purging down to birth records. A legend can be fabricated for Barry and other people just ... never existed after they were erased.

Posted by: chasmatic at May 25, 2014 6:50 PM

I'm a librarian.

I won't defend the leftism which infests much of libraryland (a recent example).

But it makes sense to buy popular books instead of classics. It's irresponsible for a taxpayer-funded library to buy books that never or rarely get checked out. And the likes of The Big-Ass Book of Bling do actually get checked out--a lot.

Posted by: John Farrier at May 25, 2014 6:52 PM

If not for the library; where would homeless people go to sleep and poop?

Posted by: Warren at May 25, 2014 8:26 PM

I took my grandson to the library and found a book about a Brave Five Year old who helped organize the garment workers strike. Good times.

Posted by: Jewel at May 25, 2014 8:50 PM

Warren: there oughta be a list of concerned liberals, funded by money from the bleeding hearts commies in Hollywood. Homeless could stay with persons on the list. The libs could develop bragging rights based on how many homeless they are sheltering.

Posted by: chasmatic at May 25, 2014 8:51 PM

I guess it depends on what you think a library is for: being popular or being a positive influence on a community by providing quality literature.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at May 26, 2014 7:09 AM

While libraries have not yet outlived their usefulness their popularity has been challenged by electronic media. In terms of productivity considering physical content and maintenance required a real physical made from trees collection of books is no easy situation. The computer-like reader devices and internet access make for a faster and perhaps more comprehensive source of information.

I grew up with libraries, frequented them, used them as a social nexus. There was no alternative. Schools, communities, some corporations were the only places one could find literature, reference, music, art, &c.

if we consider the material benefits, paper book libraries are becoming inefficient. if we consider the abstract qualities like sheer mass of knowledge physically displayed, the act of "going to the library", social interactions, so forth then hard-copy libraries triumph.

Harder to measure is the effect of effort contributing to value. When I wrote the thousand word term paper after spending many hours in the library hunting down books on the subject, following false trails, gathering visual items, copious notes, drafts &c that term paper meant something. A labor of love so to speak. If I had used electronic media I could have put it together during one afternoon. I would not have more than a superficial knowledge of the subject and the most learning would have been in the area of how to manipulate the computers and programming and how to hit the "print" button.

I must confess, "going to the library" during high school was a good alibi when I wanted to cruise with my pals drinking ill-gotten beer or when I was chasing some skirt. Wouldn't you?

Posted by: chasmatic at May 26, 2014 8:52 AM

I love libraries. I love reading library book. I love the concept of a place you can go to and borrow books and read them by the dozen at a time. I love the concept of a vast location filled with books, open to the public for a small sum of money; most were started and largely funded by foundations like Carnegie.

The problem is libraries aren't being run like that any more, they're being run as yet another multicultural left leaning outlet for the True Faith.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at May 26, 2014 11:08 AM

Come the EMP, libraries may be the only place to find the written word.

Posted by: tripletap at May 26, 2014 12:19 PM

trip: didn't think of that. Still, physical paper and glue libraries are so fragile. Storage and access are the pinch points to any system like this.

Posted by: chasmatic at May 26, 2014 12:35 PM

Not around here, my entire office which I built 8 years ago is a giant faraday cage. That's right, 40 square yards of 18ga copper netting stapled to the plywood roof decking under the #30lb felt paper. Same on the walls, under the tyvek. Inside resides various computers with 100,000+ e-books of every genre and in multiple formats, backed up on multiple hard drives, DVD discs and USB drives.

The most crucial stuff is on a 64gb USB drive on my EDC key ring.

Bring it.

Posted by: ghostsniper at May 26, 2014 6:26 PM

I have been exiled to Oregon for some years now, and started out indulging my habit of libraries (acquired in much the same way and appreciation as chasmatic) at the Oregon State University library. What struck me at the time and eventually turned me away was the observation that the building is literally surrounded by quotations, none of which were ever uttered by a straight, white, dead male. The banalities were overpowering.

I hit the coming Information Age at just the right time. I have slowly built up a combination of paper books and a computerised library, developed through my education that taught me an appreciation of the culture that was, before the advent of so much access to information as long as it was no more than ten years old.

Posted by: Darkwater at May 28, 2014 2:39 AM

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)