Let's start with the intention to remove the Institute of Museum and Library Services as one of those things that has intense return for the money invested in it, but doesn't personally benefit someone wealthy, and therefore is "waste" for the government. IMLS does a lot for people and their libraries, at the state and local level, and their budget is usually chump change compared to the bigger-ticket items that are generally unquestioned. If you feel like walloping your legislators into funding something they can pay out of the waste budget of the Pentagon, by all means, do it The IMLS folks also point out that an agency established by Congress cannot simply be terminated at the whims of the Executive. (Which is presumably true of a lot of the agencies that the Executive has directed the closure or destruction of.) Just understand that the current interim director is a toady who is fully on board with dismantling IMLS instead of fighting for it and to keep it alive, and therefore, treat anything official coming out of there as a collaborator trying to turn libraries and museums into propaganda vehicles for messages that are antithetical to what museums and libraries actually do.
None of this matters to the people who want to get rid of it all, of course, and they have proceeded to demand that all of the staff at IMLS be put on administrative leave and they return any work property they may have. Because the toady in charge is more than willing to let the unelected campaign donor and his team of minions destroy the agency. He probably even thinks that he's doing everyone a favor by getting rid of a highly partisan agency (partisan, in this case, meaning "actually believes in doing good with government funds instead of using government as a slush fund for private entities to loot without accountability.")
( Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of politics inside the cut )
Last for tonight, a plea for readers not to allow themselves to become mere consumers of the things they read, even though business and corporations wants us to consume more and more so their lines and numbers will go up. Which was given to me in the context of a suggestion that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" in art are often the things that are best there for the experience of the person there, which pulls on the thread more that consumers are there to be pandered to, and those who experience art are there to experience the art, even if the art disquiets them or challenges them in some way. This post gets referenced by Chuck Wendig, who points out that the lure of LLMs and other such plagiarism and confabulation machines is that one merely needs to give them the idea, and they will produce all of the execution of it, when the idea is, at best, the beginning of the process, and the execution is the part where the idea becomes something great (or less great). While also noting that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" are often the things that people want to ban books and materials over, and that the "necessary"-ness of something is the shield that many materials-banners hide behind, on the belief that they're not against the thing itself, they're merely against the "unnecessary" use or presence of it. Of course, for many of those people who would ban things, we find rather quickly that the amount of "necessary" they believe should exist in those materials is none.
(Materials via![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
None of this matters to the people who want to get rid of it all, of course, and they have proceeded to demand that all of the staff at IMLS be put on administrative leave and they return any work property they may have. Because the toady in charge is more than willing to let the unelected campaign donor and his team of minions destroy the agency. He probably even thinks that he's doing everyone a favor by getting rid of a highly partisan agency (partisan, in this case, meaning "actually believes in doing good with government funds instead of using government as a slush fund for private entities to loot without accountability.")
( Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of politics inside the cut )
Last for tonight, a plea for readers not to allow themselves to become mere consumers of the things they read, even though business and corporations wants us to consume more and more so their lines and numbers will go up. Which was given to me in the context of a suggestion that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" in art are often the things that are best there for the experience of the person there, which pulls on the thread more that consumers are there to be pandered to, and those who experience art are there to experience the art, even if the art disquiets them or challenges them in some way. This post gets referenced by Chuck Wendig, who points out that the lure of LLMs and other such plagiarism and confabulation machines is that one merely needs to give them the idea, and they will produce all of the execution of it, when the idea is, at best, the beginning of the process, and the execution is the part where the idea becomes something great (or less great). While also noting that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" are often the things that people want to ban books and materials over, and that the "necessary"-ness of something is the shield that many materials-banners hide behind, on the belief that they're not against the thing itself, they're merely against the "unnecessary" use or presence of it. Of course, for many of those people who would ban things, we find rather quickly that the amount of "necessary" they believe should exist in those materials is none.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
