Fahrenheit 451

How does this make sense? Florida school district bans dictionaries and encyclopedias. It's crazy how hard these people are trying to look stupid

Republicans are stupid, Maga idiots and so forth......gotta keep their base under "control", rule them and not be educated

I bet you have alot in common with Joe Biden

That moment when someone invokes a literary reference during the act of calling people stupid, but doesn’t actually know the literature… embarrassing.

Fahrenheit 451 isn’t about banning books or government censorship. It’s about mass media (radio and television in Bradbury’s time) “turning people into morons” because they don’t consume primary sources, instead, relying on talking heads to spoon feed them content.

Ray Bradbury said so - repeatedly.

He was more or less right regarding radio and television, but he was an absolute visionary regarding social media, which he only barely got to experience by the time he died in 2012 at the age of 91.

That moment when somebody does a quick google search to quote the author of a book he clearly hasn't read to try to seem intelligent.

The book has literal book burning in the story. 451° F is the temperature at which paper burns. Florida is metaphorically burning books so that school students can't read them in schools.

The title of the thread is perfectly fine. This is P&L, not Book Club.

OT: This story is ridiculous. What exactly is being achieved by pulling actual educational reference material from school bookshelves? If it were any other state my first thoughts would be that the school district is doing this in protest of the law signed by Ron DeSantis. But, since it is Florida, I can only surmise that they want to perpetuate the 'Florida Man' stereotype for at least one more generation.

Do you live in Florida perchance?

Doesn't seem to have access to the book, so yes.

I guess you’re that guy with the quick Google search because you haven’t read the book. I spoon fed you the thesis (per the actual author, who is the absolute authority on his work) and you still get it wrong. If you were trying to sound intelligent, it didn’t work.


You guys screwing it up despite having primary sources available to you is exactly the kind of lazy consumption that the author was warning about when he wrote the book.

And yes: removing dictionaries, encyclopedias, and Guinness book of world records is dumb.

The Irony of insisting a book can have only one theme and that theme is the one spoon fed to you by the author, and the theme of said book is people not reading original sources and accepting whatever is spoon fed to them. Nice

It is a long running tradition that banning a book makes it more popular and a must read for many people. Let's hope this is a tradition that continues!

So, the people that religiously watch fox news, tucker, cnn, etc and take their points as a political stance, relying on the spoon fed bullshit that are literal non-issues?

The author is the most authoritative primary source. He isn’t an editor offering his opinion about it.

Nothing like doubling down on being wrong. Nice.

Also Alex Jones, MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, The Young Turks, etc.

The Irony is lost on you again, or you can’t quietly bow out when an argument doesn’t go your way. There is a prevalent theme of book burning in the book, in the same interview you’re quoting(if you even watched it) he is talking about book bans. If you’re going to quote someone again without doing any critical thinking don’t bother replying because I’ll just ignore you.

Gee this book sounds cool. Tell me more about it. For instance....what is the main character's job?

I don’t think you know what irony really means. It definitely doesn’t mean “freedom to pigheadedly insist that incorrect statements are literal fact”.


You should ignore me, because I will never ever believe you more than I believe the multitude of times the author has made this clear.


Imagine the absolute arrogance of you telling Ray Bradbury what Ray Bradbury’s book is about.


You’re wrong. The author said so.

Weller: have you encounted academic misinterpretation of your work?

Bradbury: I was lecturing at Cal Fullerton once and they misinterpreted Fahrenheit 451, and after about half an hour of arguing with them, telling them that they were wrong, I said, “f**k you.” I've never used that word before, and I left the classroom.

I’ve spent more than half an hour defending Bradbury from misinterpretation by you, so if you aren’t willing to accept the authors statement as authoritative regarding his work, I’ll use another quote from him: “f**k you.”

What other authors do you enjoy informing about the thesis of their work?

I actually have read F451. The main character's job is to look for illegal books and set them on fire. That's such a weird choice for a story that has absolutely nothing to do about banning books.

As to your question...
I'd question EL James who claims there is no abusive behavior in the 50 Shades series
I'd question Rowling who once claimed death eaters were bad primarily for not wanting to "live in secret."
I'd question JRR Tolkien who was very coy about the influence the world wars had on his work and downplayed it.
I'd question Piers Anthony who insists he isn't a pervy weirdo


This is actually pretty common? There's a whole field of literary analysis called "death of the author" which stresses that authors are not final authority on the meaning of their work.