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What really sucks is that the people that watch this crap have never stepped foot in a library.
But now they will?
Would you believe, also no.
I dunno. My parents were very conservative. They raised me with my entertainment being “go pick ten library books” because it was free.
They weren’t going to spend unnecessary money on us kids
Sorry, Jesse, The Onion beat you to it by 10 years.
(For those wondering, this screenshot is real and is from April 2024; their source was a shitty, fearmongering article from the New York Post published on April 8 that I’m deliberately not going to link here.)
If libraries didn’t already exist, there’s not a chance in hell anyone would be allowed to create one. It would be regarded as an insane communist act of mass theft, and anyone attempting it would be sued to oblivion.
By extension, if we allow public libraries to get shut down, we are never getting them back.
I’d agree with you, but so many people are putting up those little free libraries out front their houses. The best bar in town is also a library. If we didn’t have libraries we’d make them ourselves. It is our nature.
When we moved in together: My wife had half a full bookshelf, I had two small bookshelves and two full bookshelves full of books. Like, I wouldn’t have married her if she didn’t love storytelling enough to have a small library of her own. Now she has more books than me, we’ve had to get another full bookshelf just for her elementary age library.
This is just our personal, private library. If they got rid of our public library, we’d take out the books we needed for work, the ones that have sentimental value, and the ones we need to reread, and then we’d get together with the rest of the community and with our own private libraries we’d put the public library back together by the end of the month. (that bar that’s a library? That’s how they got their books. They got some of my old science fiction) a town without a public library is a town without its heart and soul.
If Jeff Bezos decided he was going to try persuading the Republican Party to have those little libraries declared illegal and for the police to be mobilised to confiscate them, would you put his chances at above 10%, or below?
Which libraries, exactly? I need to know, so that, uhh, I can avoid them.
The ones in areas with a lot of homelessness. Although the sex part is weird, lol. And overall this seems exaggerated.
From this diverse panel of five people who have never set foot in a public library…
This means they’re planning on shutting down libraries and they’re going to attack libraries until the public stops caring and then they’ll start shutting them down
I think it’s time for me to get my library card.
This was intended as a joke. But actually go get your library card. It shows that they still need to be funded.
Not only that, but the library is just great to use.
- You have free access to people whose job it is to be incredible at finding shit. I’ve spent ten years in a hobby where 80% of the work is just tracking down proper sources, and I think I could mop the floor with a layperson at that; I am scared of how inept a librarian would make me look by comparison.
- Libraries are great for research beyond books; they often have vast digital (or sometimes microfilm) archives with information you may literally not be able to find anywhere else.
- In an era where book piracy is completely trivial for most of the books your library is likely to have, a physical copy (even if you have a dedicated e-reader, in my opinion, as someone who has one) is still just nicer in most situations. It’s also just easier to discover good books when there are shelves of them – opposed to trawling sites like GoodReads (Amazon-owned btw).
- It’s a great space to chill out, especially by yourself.
- If you’re ever down on your luck or otherwise just need some service you don’t regularly use like printing or faxing, you can go there and do it instead of owning a device you use once a year.
just need some service you don’t regularly use like printing or faxing, you can go there and do it instead of owning a device you use once a year
I do ALL my printing at the library these days.
My local library lets you print up to 80 pages per week, completely free. And their printer always works, never has issues, never out of toner or out of paper, never seen it jam…
I am so much happier doing my printing at the library, rather than trying to maintain a working printer of my own.
A couple counties over they have a 3d printer and I’ve been telling myself I need to go try not to break that thing one of these days
It’s easy to laugh, but this is just another step in undermining public institutions in the US so they can close or privatize them, and it’s abhorrent.
I should go to the library…
Drug-infested, sex dens
That may actually be correct according to
braindead corporatesome mainstream style standards, but it feels in some way semantically wrong. ‘Sex den’ feels like a whole concept, not ‘sex’ as an adjective before ‘den’ that would require a comma before the only real descriptor of ‘drug-infested’.Also, my local library sucks, apparently, because I didn’t even get a single suck last time I went.
I distinctly remember this eighth grade grammar lesson, because my teacher marked me wrong for not putting a comma in “red, pickup truck” even though the rule she taught us says there shouldn’t be one. the rule supposedly is that you should put in a comma, if the comma could be replaced with “and,” e.g. “the big, round, gray rock” could be “the big and round and gray rock.” so tell me Mrs. B, who the hell is out here saying “the red and pickup truck”? who would say “the truck is red and pickup”?
If it makes you feel any better, Mrs. B is probably dead now.
This is straight-up incorrect grammar, and I don’t know of any style guides that would condone this – let alone mandate it.
It’s an obvious typo; my pet theory for the most likely explanation is that it was originally “Libraries turning into drug, sex dens”, but then, at the last minute, somebody changed it to “drug-infested sex dens” and forgot to remove the comma.
Perhaps they’re dens of drug-infested sex?
I didn’t even get a single suck last time I went.
Well, did you ask the librarian for assistance or not?
How to get more people to go to the library:
Looks like host (centre) is doing manspreading on steroids lol
Reminds me of a story; his family was into satanic panic and made the devil sound rad as hell by being into metal, drugs, sex, etc… Now I suppose libraries are rad as hell, so that’s good for the children.
That comma was inserted with the intention of writing a longer line of scandalising adjectives. I wonder what they were.
Even their focus group of conservative viewers found that those other adjectives made libraries sound cool and fun.
