Mississippi libraries ordered to delete research in response to state laws
108 comments
·April 9, 2025mahkeiro
subsection1h
Shitting on less developed areas of the world is one of Hacker News's favorite guilty pleasures. Let me try to assist.
Maternal mortality rate in Iran in 2020: 22/100,000 live births [1]
Maternal mortality rate in Mississippi in 2018-2022: 39.1/100,000 live births [2]
Infant mortality rate in Iran in 2022: 10.35/1,000 live births [3]
Infant mortality rate in Mississippi in 2022: 9.11/1,000 live births [4]
[1] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240068759
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/maternal-mortality/data.htm
[3] https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...
[4] https://www.cdc.gov/maternal-infant-health/infant-mortality/
CharlieDigital
The West has made Iran out to be some backwater bogeyman when it is actually quite developed and in some areas progressive compared to our other allies in the region.
Rick Steve's Iran was a great watch that everyone should check out.
swat535
There's a lot of misunderstanding in the West about Iranians, or as we call ourselves "Persians." (I suppose to avoid the negative "Islamic" connotation..) Despite how the country is portrayed, the people themselves tend to be pro Western, educated, and fairly liberal.
So the unfortunate reality is that the government is highly repressive. It tightly controls communication and enforces a strict theocratic system that doesn’t reflect the will of much of the population.
If you're curious about what Iranian society is all about, look at the photos before the 1979 revolution. That change wasn't long ago, it was just a generation back. My parents lived through it. Many from that time believed they were rising up for democracy, not realizing what would replace the Shah was something even more authoritarian. My own father admits they were misled and now actively curses the regime and himself.. the peak being burning the US embassy because they were told it's a foreign spy command center..
What's especially tragic is that Iran today has a very young population, many of whom strongly oppose the current regime. But peaceful change feels unlikely, look up what happened anytime people took to the streets. And if the government were to collapse without a clear path forward, there's a real risk of something even worse filling the vacuum.
That said, there are reasons for hope. During the most recent uprising, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, women led the charge, and the government was forced to back down somewhat after international outcry. Since then, many women have continued to defy mandatory hijab laws, walking around without head coverings despite the real risks of arrest or violence. It’s incredibly brave, and it speaks to a deep, ongoing resistance that’s hard to suppress:
IAmBroom
Boasting that Iran has similar birth-related mortality rates to Mississippi is ... I don't know what you're trying to prove, actually.
Mississippi is one of the worst states in the US for maternity health; the US is one of the worst countries in the developed world for the same.
The comment you're responding to implied that Mississippi was comparable to Iran, and you rebutted that... the data supports that claim.
potato3732842
Nitpick: You need to account for abortion access when comparing infant mortality across jurisdictions.
Tepix
No, you don't.
bko
The charitable interpretation is that this isn't real science. If you have gender studies papers like the fake "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon" that showed dog parks were "rape-condoning spaces" where canine interactions reflected human rape culture and systemic oppression. They get through the system even though they are obviously satire. And yes, it was peer reviewed and even recognized as a significant contribution to feminist geography during the journal's anniversary celebration before the hoax was revealed
There were always things we considered science that are no longer considered science or harmful (blood letting, lobotomy, race science, etc)
tgv
While I also consider most of sociology and its ilk to be unscientific, and the rest to be only tenuously scientific, we all know that the real reason behind this order is not so charitable. Those in power don't care about science, they simply dislike what's written in those papers.
watwut
I would add that when you actually started to read and listen to what actual sociologists say and do ... it was nothing like what random math graduate mussing on HN thinks it is. The popular approach here of cherry picking two small studies and running wild with them was not all that much a thing.
Instead there was way more care about making conclusions, a lot of nuance and conditional statements (this study says so under those conditions and another one opposes sort of thing). But, what certain people here actually hate the most are results that are fairly consistent and were reproduced to death.
JCattheATM
> While I also consider most of sociology and its ilk to be unscientific, and the rest to be only tenuously scientific,
They are not any less scientific than, say, physics just because they have a harder time observing and modeling things.
bko
It can be both. If they believe there is some harmful effect on this particular pseudo science about grievance politics that's driving social contagion and self harm, then they believe it should be removed, at least from places like libraries.
You'll see the same thing with race science. I reject it not because I'm well versed on how it's not rigorous enough, although it may be, but I think it's on its face because incredibly harmful.
watwut
Your example is a hoax article. It was not written by people you criticize. They never used it as an argument by them either.
Also, given development last few years, it turned out grievance studies were pretty correct about misogyny in society and about where rather large part of conservative population wants to go. Overall, they actually diagnosed things pretty accurately.
mcphage
> The charitable interpretation is that this isn't real science.
That doesn’t sound charitable at all.
nandomrumber
The uncharitable interpretation is that these theories are intentionally harmful and trying to push a particularly nefarious ideology for political gain.
The charitable interpretation is that this isn't real science.
guappa
They're in NATO so they're good guys™.
Also in Iran there's more female engineers than men. It's quite unlike Taliban ruled Afghanistan.
throw_m239339
> Also in Iran there's more female engineers than men. It's quite unlike Taliban ruled Afghanistan.
Also in Iran if you happened to be male & gay and get caught you have the choice between the death penalty and getting a forced "sex re-assignement" surgery.
LtWorf
So, not unlike every single protestant country 30 years ago.
potato3732842
Iran is the gifted kid that should've left the hood but didn't of the middle east.
ASalazarMX
Considering Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism are brothers of the book, not much difference really. Fantasy has too much influence in their politics.
boxed
The slight difference is the difference between throwing gays off of tall buildings and complaining about them getting married.
rsynnott
There are absolutely people on the US right who want to re-ban homosexuality; one of the bloody _supreme court justices_ has already signalled a willingness to re-examine Lawrence v Texas.
Mississippi is one of the 14 states where homosexuality was only legalised by Lawrence v Texas in 2003.
boxed
Making it illegal is very different from throwing people off tall buildings.
Terr_
I don't think you're aware of America's own shameful history of criminalizing homosexuality, how recently that was still happening, and how some of the people currently wielding Federal power want to go back to it.
DoingIsLearning
If rule of law and due process are arbitrarily ignored then the only real difference is time.
Given enough time all can degenerate.
boxed
> If rule of law and due process are arbitrarily ignored then the only real difference is time.
Due process isn't a part of any religion afaik. And "rule of law" in Christianity and Islam is "suffer not a witch to live" and stuff like that. Not good.
> Given enough time all can degenerate.
"Degenerate" is a strange word in this context. Islam started as an imperialist death cult. Any movement towards liberalism and sanity is not something I'd call "degenerate". Christianity is hard to pin down where it started because it started small and without power. As soon as it got real power it turned evil real fast.
firen777
I appreciate your effort to reign in some reality here to show how privileged Americans are, but the word of the day is "trajectory" and it's aiming right at bottom right now.
trhway
>The slight difference is the difference between throwing gays off of tall buildings and complaining about them getting married.
no necessarily gays. Different societies may treat as non-humans different groups of people. US has just threw several hundreds of people into a black hole of prison in El Salvador. Considering the prison conditions even in US and how even US was openly waterboarding people multiple times (180 times for one guy), one can imagine what may be happening to the people in that prison in El Salvador (read on the El Salvador death squads, and the current regime there basically continues the same behavior). A fall from a tall building may be a mercy in that context. And i guess we'd never know how many of those guys will come out, if ever, of there alive.
tvc015
Perhaps safer there than being put into American prisons. American prisons are run by the inmates. Inmate rape, gang related violence and murder are normalized and tolerated by the states and corporations that operate the prison system. Salvadoran prisons seem tightly controlled and well staffed. Perhaps they have economies of scale though?
DonHopkins
Driving them to a remote rural area to rob, pistol-whip, torture, tie to a split-rail fence, and leaving them to die, so brutally that their face was covered in blood except for where the tears washed it away, happened in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard
And the people who would do that kind of thing again are absolutely THRILLED and EMPOWERED about the current administration's policies towards gay and trans people.
And it's happening much more often now thanks to Trump's Stochastic Terrorism, aimed at his lunatic cult of MAGA followers who are every bit as fanatical and delusional and vengeful and armed to the teeth as any religious imperialist death cult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Beaten With Belts, Sticks: Transgender Man Tortured For Weeks Before Murder:
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/beaten-with-belts-sticks-tra...
>Nordquist, originally from Minnesota, travelled to New York in September to meet his online girlfriend and was staying at Patty's Lodge motel in Canandaigua.
>New York authorities have charged five individuals for the brutal torture and killing of a 24-year-old transgender man, whose body was dumped in an empty field after going through weeks of abuse.
>Sam Nordquist was subjected to relentless physical and psychological torture, according to court documents. He was punched, kicked, beaten with sticks, dog toys, ropes, canes, belts, and even assaulted with a table leg and a broomstick for weeks before succumbing to his injuries.
>Nordquist, originally from Minnesota, travelled to New York in September to meet his online girlfriend and was staying at Patty's Lodge motel in Canandaigua, about 30 minutes from Rochester. His family raised concerns after losing contact with him.
>Police launched a missing persons investigation on February 9, and on Thursday, they uncovered a "deeply disturbing pattern of abuse" at the motel, according to New York State Police Captain Kelly Swift.
>"In my 20-year law enforcement career, this is one of the most horrific crimes I have ever investigated," Ms Swift said at a press conference.
thatroof
The real story of Matthew Shepard is more complex than the false story that has been popularized:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/26/the-truth-behi...
Shepard was a meth dealer and he was in a sexual relationship with the man who killed him.
AndyMcConachie
I always find it sad when racist Americans can only imagine their own country's decline by comparing it to those countries they persecute.
TacticalCoder
[dead]
mnw21cam
Thankfully the title is slightly clickbaity. The research isn't actually being deleted at source - it is just no longer being offered by these libraries.
IAmBroom
That's the EXACT digital equivalent of book-burning: deleting the copies of the data.
tmerc
It's the exact digital equivalent of saying "it's not available at this library but you can buy it yourself or get access through another source"
Y'all give Mississippi too much credit if you think they hold the only copy of gender studies and race relations academic research.
jeroenhd
I disagree. Extensive compilations of other scientific research are research themselves.
I can't help but feel like this is the start of a modern equivalent of what happened to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaf, now masked by procedure and law.
relaxing
There’s no possible interpretation of the title where that makes sense.
Sharlin
”Just”
atoav
It is very curious that the ususally extremely loud "free speech" crowd from the US is so silent when the free speech violations happen now.
Banning literal words and then deleting research based on those words? If you needed a sign that you're well on your way into authotarianism, it doesn't get a lot clearer than that.
If you are for free speech only it it is for your side, you are not for free spech. In fact, I believe if you uncritically tow any party line, you gave up on critical thinking.
potato3732842
>If you are for free speech only it it is for your side, you are not for free spech. In fact, I believe if you uncritically tow any party line, you gave up on critical thinking.
Oh boy, oh boy. I'm so exited to be the bearer of bad news here!!
The people who believe in free speech as a matter of principal, not as a means to another political end are saying things like "fucking called it" and "told ya so" and making memes about how the demographics who are currently pissed off about this should have listened to them in years past and not lent political will to equally ham fisted stupidity that paved the way to this.
Which is basically the same thing that A LOT of single issue communities are saying right about now.
rsynnott
There certainly are people in the US who are very concerned with free speech, and they're generally outraged by stuff like this. When the likes of Elon Musk go on about 'free speech', though, they actually mean ideologically correct speech.
null
sjsdaiuasgdia
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
tmerc
This headline is incredibly misleading to the point of being an inflammatory lie.
MLC (https://www.mlc.lib.ms.us/) is a state body that helps library systems in the state with govt money. They have a tool called MAGNOLIA that gives public libraries, community colleges, and k12 schools access to scholarly databases like ebscohost. This article says that MAGNOLIA no longer provides access to those collections. Larger universities in the state don't use MAGNOLIA as they have (and pay for) their own access.
No research is being deleted. Mississippi doesn't have the power to delete research in ebscohost. They're using a feature provided by ebscohost to exclude access to those collections. This is literally 2 bit flips in a database.
https://connect.ebsco.com/s/article/Content-in-EBSCOhost-Dat...
However, if you have concerns about the material included in MAGNOLIA, you can request a review of the material on the MLC website: https://www.mlc.lib.ms.us/review/
boxed
I think a lot of gender studies and race studies in the US is either bogus, or makes the problem worse. But removing it from being searched also makes it harder to debunk, which is stupid in a totally different way.
kgwxd
No need to waste time debunking when the base just believes what they’re told, even in the face of constant contradictory personal experience.
im3w1l
I haven't made up my thinking about this yet. I think first there is the principal question. Is a library deleting content always a violation of free speech? And I think the answer to that question is no. A library comes with an expectation of quality, so they must do do content curation, keeping quality content in and low-quality content out. Those who are not judged to meet the bar are not silenced, they have other options for getting their opinions and material out.
But the harder question is whether this particular material was unfairly singled out or not. If the library is unfairly suppressing quality research then that would be a bad thing. I think what would help me understand the situation in that respect is if someone posted examples of high quality research that was deleted but arguably shouldn't have been.
throwawayqqq11
Libraries cannot and should not perform such a task. External bodies like peer reviews are meant to assess quality and only if reputation of a publication has plummeted because of it, libraries should intervene and pull the content.
The harder (rhetorical) question is, if any solid quality assessment had been made by the executive.
rsynnott
Double-plus-ungood.
DoingIsLearning
As a European I feel like I have a lot of safety and guarantees.
I also have children and I obviously worry a great deal about what the world will look like when they grow up.
Whatever is happening at the moment has been set in motion in the past 15 years in this slow tectonic movement towards a likely repetition of past history. In that context there seems to be a huge information /misinformation/propaganda/psy ops operation happen under our feet.
The wake up call for me was during the past US presidential campaign. I heard in my social circle (three separate) under 25 yr old males (all raised and living in social-democratic Central Europe) repeating tiktok/instagram talking points, about how Trump "...will be good for 'the economy' ".
In light of past interesting discussion in HN, I ask the question:
How can we as citizens contribute to counter this? And how can governance / intelligence counter act something that now appears unstoppable and entrenched?
smcin
> "...will be good for 'the economy' "
"The economy" in the US does not mean "jobs" or "the general public" or "the middle class" or "workers" or "people who live in your town/city/region" or "the general public's savings/ standard-of-living". It means "the stock holdings and assets of the top ~20(-40)% richest".
The top 10% of Americans held 93% * of all stocks, while the bottom 50% only 1%, as of 1/2024. (* It was only 70% back in 2019 [2]. That's a huge 5-year change.)
(In 3Q/2024, the bottom 50% of households held $4.8T real estate assets + just $0.3T stocks. The top 1%, by comparison, held over $16T stocks + $6T real estate assets.)
[0]: Scott Galloway (Prof G) keeps talking about this distribution of wealth and why it's structurally dangerous to the US.
[1]: "The Richest 1 Percent Own a Greater Share of the Stock Market Than Ever Before" (1/2024) https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration...
[2]: Here's an older USAFacts on 2019 Fed data: https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-americans-o...
lotsofpulp
Does this account for defined benefit plan pension fund holdings, especially taxpayer funded DB pensions? Does it also allocate to individuals the equity held in accounts like state 529 plans, 401k, HSA, 403b, and other types of tax advantaged accounts? Or, for example, Norway’s sovereign fund?
Seems like a non trivial task to divvy up the beneficial ownership of equities. Plus, I would expect older people to have more savings, so there would need to be a normalization for age, presumably.
Edit: Looks like the source is here:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/index...
> The DFAs integrate two data products produced by the Federal Reserve Board: the Financial Accounts of the United States, which provide quarterly data on aggregate balance sheets of major sectors of the U.S. economy, and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which provides comprehensive triennial microdata on the assets and liabilities of a representative sample of U.S. households.
Diving more into this data seems time intensive, so I guess I’ll just take the Fed’s word for it.
smcin
Yes AFAIK the Fed data includes people's retirement plans. People's retirement plans issue them a statement; I don't see why we need to divvy up the estimated beneficial ownership.
(Defined Benefit pensions are pretty rare in the US; in March 2023, only 15% of private industry workers had access to a defined benefit pension plan, and only 11% participated in such plans; mostly govt and local workers. Hence, the Fed data averages are deceptive; ~85% of people have no DB, 15% or fewer. So if they graphed those two separate subpopulations, we'd see more representative numbers for people who spent most of their working lives working for govt + everyone else.)
(Why would you expect US Fed data on US residents to have anything to do with Norway’s sovereign fund? There are comparatively few Norwegians in the US and even fewer retirees living in the US who spent most of their life working in Norway; approximate as zero.)
Yes, obviously older people have more savings, things compound. Also their retirement plans may have historically had more generous provisions/matches. And they got to invest in previous boom cycles. And historically real-estate tended to go up not down, most of the time.
Herring
I'd start by getting a better social circle. I have zero patience for white supremacy. I fired a lot of friends over the past decade.
On a less immediate note, issues of greed are likely countered by generosity, so volunteering is good. Read what every religion has to say about that.
rsynnott
> about how Trump "...will be good for 'the economy' ".
I wonder how they're taking the current economic news...
im3w1l
As a citizen, your best bet is to educate yourself cultivate good judgment and speak the truth so you get the respect and trust of your circle. So that even people that disagree with you still take your opinion seriously. And realize that people have always believed in bullshit so you need to be realistic in your ambitions and be patient rather than upset when someone is wrong.
rs186
TIL a Mississippi based media organization can't even properly say "library stopped offering access to academic research" in the title, instead using words that are complete nonsense "delete research".
I don't know whether the reporting or the news itself is more disappointing.
icameron
It sounds like they are deleting the special collections metadata that categorize and index the raw research, which took time to curate. I see your point but also see how someone’s research is being deleted, or at least censored.
tmerc
No deletion is happening. They're simply not providing access through a tool they provide. The collection is still available outside of that tool.
nobodyandproud
Nothing like swinging between extremes: We go from DEI & cancel culture; to hiding research and pretending
acdha
“Cancel culture” was a marketing term by people who were simultaneously trying to ban books and restrict speech, we shouldn’t take it at face value when all it ever meant was that right-wing speakers should be free from social consequences.
nobodyandproud
And this reaction is different how, exactly?
acdha
Banning books or attacking their authors livelihood makes it harder for people to be exposed to their ideas.
Criticism does not.
Tor3
Who would've believed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 would become real. And in the US of all places.
moomin
I mean, I'm pretty sure Ray Bradbury would have.
Sharlin
You do realize that Fahrenheit 451 is literally set in the US ?
If you’re seriously not aware how close to gleefully indulging in book-burning business certain US states have been and still are, K have some news for you.
Sometimes I wonder what are the fundamental differences between these states and Iran or Afghanistan except that their imaginary friend is slightly different.