Saturday, October 3, 2009

Bye Bye to Ban This!

I recorded a vlog for this but I guess I rambled a bit too much on it. It turned out to be over 12 minutes long, was rejected by YouTube after 9 hours of uploading and processing as being too long and I can't upload it anywhere else to circumvent that. Not even to my own site storage. It's close to 400 meg and the upload limit there is 50. Great.

At this point I'm too tired and fed up with uploading to deal with it right now. If I can figure something out, I'll post it up. If not, then it'll just sit and rot on my computer because I really can't be bothered to make another one. Technology is the bane of my existence, I swear. This is why I never do vlogs. It's too much hassle!

Anyway, I've pretty much said what I can say on banned and challenged books without being redundant. At least for this year. Give me time to rest and I'll be able to rehash all of my opinions on the topic next September. And for half the month I'll be able to say it while I'm on vacation is a very sunny state.

Ultimately I've come to the conclusion that book banners and book burners are just afraid. They're afraid of knowledge and intelligence, I'm sure because they don't have it. Knowledge is power, after all, and those of us that read and are knowledgeable are deemed a threat. We threaten their Stepford lives and their implied perfection. We threaten their well-being and the innocence of their children. We threaten it all with our intelligence. Our intelligence that we've garnered from books.

It's not about what's appropriate for what age. It's about giving children too much power and if they have too much power, then they'll have the power to realize all that is being kept from them and they will dissent. The mindless are so much easier to control.

Don't be a zombie. Don't allow them to rob you of the intelligence and independent thoughts that you deserve and crave. Don't let them take away your right to become smarter than they are, although that won't take much. Books are very powerful things. Just look at the uproar they cause.

Let the fires of book passion blaze and let the reading continue.

A huge thanks to everyone that participated in Ban This! in any shape or form and we will do it all again next year! I'll see you all then!

2 comments:

April (BooksandWine) said...

If you switch to the old editor on blogger, there should be a film strip icon in the editor, click that. It will let you load longer videos than youtube. It just takes awhile to load and process, but if you really want to load the vlog, it's a start.

I'm a bit sad to see the end of Ban This, it's nice seeing bloggers who really give a shit about intellectual freedom.

Definitely agree about the mindless being easy to control, if all you focus on is the brand of t-shirt Joe is wearing as opposed to actual issues (i.e. healthcare) then clearly the issue is going to go right over your head.

Anonymous said...

LOL! Love the whole Youtube uploading thing.

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