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Oh, poor beleagured RFK, Jr.
By adamg on Tue, 10/01/2024 - 9:58am
A small group of people yesterday protested the "censorship" of the bookstores in Harvard and Porter squares for allegedly refusing to carry any books by or about brainworm-adled whale-head enthusiast and Trump supporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Cambridge Day quoted one protester as saying, sure, she could just ask a bookstore to carry some of the dead-bear fan's tomes, but bookstores should know better and stock books she might serendipitously come across.
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Comments
Bookstore, not Library
A library removing copies of his books would be very problematic.
A private business that doesn't stock stuff that isn't going to sell is a private business making a sound business decision.
If only so many of us had the money to treat a bookstore like a library, ha!
Limited space
I'm not going to be upset when the title is culled for lack of circulation
A book banning by any other
A book banning by any other name . . .
Here, knock yourself out
Books by a brain worm, um, by RFK Jr.!
You'll notice a trend in what this public-health menace writes about.
Oh, and should you buy any of those, I get a cut. American capitalism is wonderful!
Lets take it a step further
Anyone who does not purchase every book ever published is participating in book banning.
Even then, not every library
Even then, not every library is the Library of Congress, they aren't going to buy every book, and it's quite valid for libraries to consider anti-vaxx books a low priority even if they're written by a moderately famous person.
Same thing
Here's the rub. If a librarian (or bookstore) gets a book and then removes it, it's censorship. If they don't procure it in the first place, it's perfectly fine.
That logic is maddening. The end result is bookstore owners and elected officials pre-screening books before their employees can procure them. That avoids being accused of censorship.
The names change, the stories stay the same
I was working in a bookstore in the early 2000s when the right wing's "let's bulk -order crap and force it onto the NYT bestseller list" strategy was in full flower. Nearly every day, someone would come in and aggressively ask for the new piece of shit by Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly. We would walk them back to the Politics aisle, hand them the one copy of said turd that we kept on the shelf for this exact reason, walk away, and then return in one minute to reshelve it because even these losers didn't actually want to spend money on the garbage, they just wanted a fight that we weren't going to give them.
Glad they're now at least getting some fresh air.
are these people serious?
No, you cannot expect a bookstore to stock every book you think someone might buy, or every bookstore you think strangers should want. She even admits that if she actually wanted the books, she could ask the bookstore to order them.
Nobody is censoring RFK Jr's views--they're readily available all over the place. Also, it wouldn't be censorship if a bookstore refused to order books about one crank who wants to stop all research on infectious disease, stop children from being vaccinated, and prosecute scientists who disagree with him.
Funny how the "but censorship!" crowd is just fine with censoring or punishing doctors who promote vaccination, but insist we have to listen to the opinions of a lawyer with no medical training.
Well, no. Serious people don
Well, no. Serious people don't consider RFK Jr. a "candidate" or a "person worth listening to" or even "a human deserving of common respect or decency."
Crosstabulation
How many of these whackjobs have signed petitions demanding that teachers not be allowed to teach books that teach actual history, or demanding school libraries remove all books about gayness, civil rights struggles, etc.?
Now Suburban Based Man Here
Driving around various places and seeing signs.
Harris sign - Sign will be stolen soon by teenagers (it is happening a lot) or like me have dirty diapers and used tampons thrown on my lawn when I had Biden sign up in 2020 along with notes written on hamburger Styrofoam that Michelle Obama is a man and Pelosi is a pedophile.
Trump sign - That homeowner is an asshole and probably has a gun.
Kennedy sign - That homeowner is on crack.
Signs, signs, signs
There's one Kennedy lawn sign near me. Pretty sure it's even new since RFK Jr became a Trumpite. I did a double-take, but it's definitely that Kennedy and that campaign, because it's got the VP candidate listed.
I'm sure the write-in will be appreciated, if the sign-poster doesn't succumb to measels before next month.
You need new neighbors
Seriously.
I'm guessing...
His neighbors wish for the same thing.
RFK
The RFK crowd is a small but loud cult. All over social media with "i hate trump but i'm with him because RFK is with him."
"They dont got to burn the
-Rage Against the Machine
So every bookstore has to
So every bookstore has to carry every book or it’s the same as book burning or censorship?
Except nobody removed Junior
Except nobody removed Junior's books because they didn't stock them in the first place. Whereas telling a privately owned business whose books they _have_ to keep in stock seems pretty authoritarian to me.
His campaign was active at Lawrence's Bread & Roses festival
on Labor Day, with a booth and roving sign-holders. I didn't see a single Harris-Walz sign there.
Is that worm really gone?
Guess he doesn't understand about how businesses get to decide what they want to sell? They also prefer to sell products people actually want to buy.