During the Obama Administration, the obsoletely titled "Southern Poverty" Law Center [†], which promotes itself as a "civil-rights organization", received federal funding to provide "hate-group" training to the (U.S.) Federal Bureau of Investigation! [....] At least as long ago as 2006, SPLC began promoting disparaging radical claims about traditional Catholics [....]
Imagine that you are the
chief librarian for a city or county
library system in the U.S.A. You're trying not only to maintain existing services, but also provide new services, of which
public access to the
Internet is increasingly popular. But because of unrelated demands on the city or county budget [$], the budget assigned to your libraries is merely flat in a favorable year, or progressively reduced in less favorable years. That's why you got your degrees in Library Science(s), right? Becoming
the administrator whose continued employment depends on providing more & more services--crowding out traditional library services--with less & less total money every year.
Hey! Soon you won't even need such a big building for the library, and you'll be able to
reduce your budget, saving money for the city or county, by downsizing all your building(s). Because "
everyone knows" that soon enough, "
all books will be digitized" and "
on the Internet". And numerous debates with your city council or county commission have made it clear that
they believe that it's true, and expect you to make it happen--
soon. No matter how patiently you've tried to explain to them, based on your good practical sense, what an
impossible--not necessarily even
desirable--
dream that popular delusion really is. And in the meantime, your budget no longer allows you to keep even 1
computer or network tech in each of your libraries during all of their open hours.
So once again another school shooting by some teen made national headlines. And he was soon discovered on
social media beforehand, proclaiming his misguided allegiance to some "hate" group--the genuine kind being few and far between--or profoundly embarrassing a legitimate ethnic-heritage group by claiming them as his motivation for his reprehensible acts. Never mind whether some pediatric-psychiatrist has fried parts of that teen's brain with years of psychoactive drugs before & after puberty (when responses to drugs can dramatically differ).
So parents and the city council or county commission are
again demanding that all "
hate speech" must be
filtered out from the computers in your library system. Will that council or commission add funds to your budget so you can accomplish that? What a silly question! Of course they won't! But it's been made clear that you'd better find a way to make that
filtering happen, and soon!
While you're imagining, please assume that the software in my speculative scenario below actually exists; I don't know that it doesn't, but it fits the modern promiscuous "install
our custom app" model about which U.S.
sheeple seem to respond "the more, the merrier"! Never mind that it would enable SPLC to install & enforce its
private biases in local-taxpayer-funded
public libraries.
Let's imagine that you briefly escape the daily library grind by attending your annual librarians' conference. You're relieved to have professional time among your own kind, and maybe more so, time away from self-centered parents and local politicians. But it's soon back to reality, as you discover that
SPLC bought its way in to librarians'-conference seminars by paying for a big exhibit booth. At
their seminar, they tell you about
their Internet software, which not only will filter out "hate", but also won't cost your libraries even a cent, because they are partnered with your federal government, which is "here to help you", by paying for
everything! As of a few years ago, SPLC didn't really need donations to meet its expenses (it was already sitting on plenty, but sent out its solicitations anyhow); so what they would've wanted to gain from the federal partnership wouldn't necessarily have been more money, but the official or
de facto federal endorsement. For participation in the conference, SPLC, which must know how skittish librarians can be about the odor of "
censorship", would've scrubbed away as much evidence as possible of their own biases against pride in
traditional religion and cultural
heritage, so the offer would seem safe, albeit a little
too good to be true.
But in your tenure as chief librarian, you've worked too hard to accomplish what you have in your library system, to risk having your career be ruined by being accused of "failure to protect the public". You know the recurring slogans: "Anything to protect the children", and all that. You've been repeatedly assured that the federally funded SPLC-specified software is really
free to your entire library system. You suppose it's at least worth giving it a
trial run. Sigh. So you go ahead and set an appointment for them to install it. But even tho' you fail to notice the metaphorical resemblance to a
lobster trap, you briefly recall Han Solo and the original film's "little moon": You indeed have "a bad feeling about this" [×].
How long will it take for the realization to dawn on you--and your library staff--that
blocking access to
CathInfo isn't a
bug in the software at all: SPLC probably considers the site to be infested with
"radical traditionalist" Catholics, so blocking
C.I. would definitely be a
feature!-------
Note $: E.g., funding
new sports venues for billionaire pro-sports franchise owners; bloating the payrolls and squeezing office space in the city or county school system with
educrats imposing political correctness; subsidizing
hospitals that are legally
victimized required to provide free care to unemployed nonresidents (d.b.a. "the homeless") and illegal aliens (mustn't-ask, don't-report).
Note ×: If your budget can't pay for you to install such
filtering software, how can your budget pay for you to remove it, if--or when--your "trial run" proves that removal is what's best overall for your library system,
hmmm?