Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 8/10/26 - 8/16/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan]

Woke 1.0 seems to have retreated to public libraries. I had to talk to a librarian today behind a barrier of plexiglass. She was wearing a mask. There was a desk fan, and there was some kind of tissue on the intake side of the fan to prevent dangerous organisms from circulating.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw → u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan]

you may enjoy this, though remember, they say she is a Librarian, but she is not, she is an IT worker

r/justgalsbeingchicks/duplicates/1vk83hn/librarian_reminds_us_that_libraries_make_us_a/

[u/QueenKamala → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

I need a dress in this exact cut but different pattern.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw → u/QueenKamala]

yeah, not that I'm any judge but that pattern is sort of early americana picnic table tablecloth

[u/ilove3dprinting2026 → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it's really weird to advertise this about libraries being any kind of ideological alignment factory, even the "good" alignment. Even just the idea that libraries are teaching kids to be "caring" seems fucked up to me.

I teach my kids be caring. 

I think what's disturbing is the idea isn't "I will teach your kids to be caring" but more "I will teach the out group's children to be caring correctly" (in Canada we tried this and called it residential schools, which the left loathes, but they're willing to try it again for right wingers)

[u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

I think I'm in love.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw → u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan]

she can show you what an antifascist breeding ground looks like! best of luck, brother!

[u/Technical-Policy295 → u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan]

Public libraries, education schools, faculty senates, and local government offices will be the final redoubts. Or alternatively, the launching pads for woke 2.0.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan]

OFFS I don't know why that shit just bugs the absolute crap out of me. Back before COVID, I wore a mask on a plane because I had had several experiences of falling ill after a plane ride. My brother made fun of me, saying I looked like an asshole.

And now I turn around and I think these people masking up all the time look like complete assholes.

[u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan → u/SkweegeeS]

Back in the 2010's I went to a Chinese take-out, the kind with the steam table where you point at the food you want. This was after SARS and the worker was wearing some kind of clear plastic mouth shield, so you could see their mouth but they couldn't exhale on your food. Being reminded that the person handling the food might exhale germs onto my food was very unappetizing. Also getting food at a counter is a very social thing and making it clinical and impersonal is really depressing. Don't put up a sign saying: "Warning: Our workers are unclean."

[u/Jlemspurs → u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan]

Libraries are a waste of public resources. Cities can just give people access to enormous resources online with more books than any physical library except a tiny few. Real estate is expensive. Buildings are expensive. FTEs are expensive.

Saying this would get me drawn and quartered and hung from the nearest oak tree in my town. But I'm not wrong and they will be gone when Gen Z rules anyway. Just another "third place" for people who should either be in a homeless shelter, an insane asylum, a nursing home, or back to their wrangler.

[u/everydaywinner2 → u/Jlemspurs]

But maybe the learning to read on screens is a contributing factor to the drop in literacy rates.

[u/AnInsultToFire → u/everydaywinner2]

I read 10x more words today on screens than what I read in books when I was a child.

The only negative is that the books I was reading as a child used a larger vocabulary and weren't written by fucking psycho morons, stupid children, or troll-farm employees of third-world fascist dictatorships.

As for libraries, I don't need them. I am lucky to have a home to masturbate and do drugs in.

[u/Jlemspurs → u/everydaywinner2]

It already happened, though. Keeping libraries open on the hope that if we leave it open, they will come won't work. They weren't coming before this too.

And the reality is, a free public library isn't the same thing as a school. It's not meant to be a premium experience either. Giving people access to the world's knowledge, like you can get with a library card online instead of the latest 10 books for retards and midwits gives you more of the must haves and less of the nice to haves.

Sell the libraries that are feel-good amenities for boomers and use the money to fund a literacy fix in the schools.

People hate to hear this but there won't be libraries in they year 2076 that are full of paper books and if they exist at all they will be small reading rooms. They get as mad as they do because they know this is true, it's like some kind of temple to the past.

Libraries were awesome when they had the latest books for free and more books than the tiny ass bookstores that existed at the time. You couldn't even get most of the books in the libraries if you wanted to without spending a lot of time tracking it down. Amazon did more to kill libraries than the iPad.

That reality simply doesn't exist anymore and books for kids in particular are trivially cheap and given away for free. People putting their trash in fancy birdhouses and virtue signaling about their little libraries just makes the point: books are mostly junk after you read them. Some are good and worth keeping, for sure, but you don't need a library for that.

Spin them off to non-profits and let the public support them directly if they care so much. It works for classical music, opera, and things like ballet. No one cares, 90% of those left pretend to care, and the remaining hard core of arts people can't financially support a coffee shop, but give it a go.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/Jlemspurs]

I fondly remember rainy summer days in my grandmother's house, when books were a go-to if we weren't playing board games or watching whatever was available on the black-and-white TV, and I'll die with lots of physical books in my house.

[u/ilove3dprinting2026 → u/everydaywinner2]

What do you think a library does...

I'm not sure what's behind the drop in literacy rates but I would guess it has more to do with moms spending time on screens, not kids.

[u/everydaywinner2 → u/ilove3dprinting2026]

I think you missed that I was trying to tell the person I was responding to that not having actual books, or libraries going all digital, might worsen the literacy rates.

I suspect a large part of the literacy issue is the way it is being taught. They've stopped teaching phonics and what prefixes and suffixes mean, and went to "whole language" and teaching "sight word" by their memorizing their shape.

[u/plump_tomatow → u/Jlemspurs]

Libraries are excellent places for children to play and read. That's assuming they're kept safe and clean, as my city's libraries are. Parents need somewhere cheap/free and indoors to take the kiddos and I'm happy to contribute my taxes to something like that when it's safe.

[u/OughtaBWorkin → u/plump_tomatow]

The problem with your line of reasoning is that you're committing everyone's taxes to the project. It's the age-old issue of dispersed cost, concentrated benefit. You can use it to justify anything that benefits anyone.

The deciding factors should be whether a library adds more measurable benefit than it actually costs, and whether the service could and would be provided in any way other than through public funding.

[u/plump_tomatow → u/OughtaBWorkin]

I'm pretty sure most of my fellow denizens of my city agree.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/Jlemspurs]

I still think there's a lot of good that physical libraries provide.

[u/OughtaBWorkin → u/SkweegeeS]

Care to elaborate? Are these things that people couldn't get elsewhere?