Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Some banana republic? Or a country like Switzerland that's probably missing from the list, but not because there aren't any banned books?
You really think it's common for free countries to ban books. I'm pretty sure my country of Finland (not "some banana republic) does not have any banned books.
Not a banana republic. And we simply don't ban books. Like, some might be banned implicitly because of illegal content, for example a child porn book wouldn't really fly here, but that's because of the content, book itself wouldn't be banned, you would just go to prison for sharing child pornography. I assume I could find other illegal content that would result in an implicit ban.
But there's no government body that even can create a list of books that should be banned. Hopefully it stays that way.
You're right. Looking at the list again, there are a lot of countries missing. Like Finland, which vaionko mentioned and several others from all kinds of continents. But I think what you said also applies to a lot of other democratic and free countries in the list. For example if I look at the list of Germany, where I'm from... That mainly lists books that include holocaust denial (which is a crime here, due to history) or other misinformation concerning that. And instructional books on how to build bombs or poison someone. So it's not like our courts are banning books without a proper reason, either. And I think it mainly concerns distributing and selling those books. Owning them is fine, with more or less the one exception of child pornography.
And it's not the government's job to ban books here, either. These are some individual(?) court rulings.
But with that said, my country isn't at the top of freedom of speech. I think we're cutting down on libel and defamation more than some other countries. And sometimes an author or publisher gets sued for publishing a book containing doxxing or lots of personal information abot celebrities/polititians without their consent. And then that's effectively banned from being distributed.