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Quoi?
What kind of internet user thinks up these questions?

In short, I wouldn't ban any book. Really. No, not even The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, not Mein Kampf, not Huckleberry Finn.
Not any hate-mongering, free-love-ing, right wing, left wing... what have you.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to tell the kid who may or may not be interested in a book to be aware that every book presents and represents a certain stand-point and that it's usually better to be not take every piece of writing at face value.

Literary merit is for book critics, not for critical analysis.

I'd prefer to steer teens towards work that doesn't implicitly (or explicitly) state that some people are more human than others - because that would just make me a hypocrite. But I think that disallowing those subjects simply make it harder to fight and oppose the ideas and ideals which exist - having them where you can see them, makes it easier to argue and fight against.

That's what I think.

So goes the saying.
Al Capone is reputed to have said that... it's funny that Chicago brought forth a man of that calibre, no?
Huh.
Maybe... not so much.

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What a wonderful question on these here elections days.

I went to vote with Mummy at around 10-ish. I was quite excited seeing as it was my first general elections, as I've mentioned before.

I'd like to address these three options through through the prism of Israel Politics.

I'm an Optimist because I voted positively on the issues and not against a candidate that I found nauseating through a vote that would make me need to have a shower once I got home. I voted for a party which barely has any mandates in the Knesset, but which did the grey work and actually passed laws that were social and environmental. I've heard the MK's and candidates speak and while there are problems, they're not problems that can't be fine tuned, tweaked or dealt with.

I'm a Pessimist because I don't think that anyone of the Prime Ministers to be will be good for the country. I don't think any of them hold any of the People's interests at heart, nor do I believe any of them have the ability to plan more than a year a head.
If someone with some actual fore sight bothered to try and run for PM, they'd be eating dust, because the People (you, me, us) don't have any fore sight either.
We don't have much of a memory either.
Hence by Bibi Netanyahu will be elected Prime Minister.
Again.

I'm a Realist because no matter what happens, we'll drudge and charge through and not much will be different. Because things do not change via a system that is so far removed from those who have voted the Leaders in.

This is, after all, politics.

If I am anything, I am a Cynical Optimist and I believe in the Vox Populi Vox Day and when only 60+% of the Populi cast a Vox... there is not God to speak of, or for.
But I have hope.
Simply because if I didn't, I wouldn't to care.
And then... why would I bother about anything.

I sign this oh so positive entry with a quote:
There's no certainty – only opportunity.
- V for Vendetta

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Teevee.
Television.
As a sampler and some-times addict of that potent drug I can't help but try and explain.

Commencing academia babble now:
Benedict Anderson wrote about Imagined Communities, the idea that through a non-existent or imagined commonality we establish the community in which we live.
He speaks mainly about the print and literature in order to exemplify this, because News papers are the most reproduced form of literature in the world today - think of those scenes in 1940's and 50's movies in which the frame is filled with men in fedoras and all of them reading the New York Time or the London Times, etc. Are they looking at one another? Do they communicate with each other? Most likely they can barely recognize each others face, but they are reading the same thing and they imagine or consider what they think about they are reading to be social consensus, despite the fact that they most likely would never talk about what they are thinking to another person.
That's an imagined community.

Television takes it one step further in my opinion.
News papers are relevant until the next edition and it takes conscious thought to read and absorb the information and data printed on a page.
Television by its nature, allows you to switch off your cognitive operations and just sponge in what is going on as you watch the screen.
Television has replaced religion when it comes to values as well.
Once in order to know what was right and wrong you listened to pulpits to tell you who was good, who was evil and what one should believe.
Now television tells us who is vilified, what is beautiful, how we ourselves can be like the idols which we worship on the flat screened alter.
Instead of family prayer, a family will congregate around the television and watch the episode of whatever programme we are addicted to at the moment.
And we obsess about it, no less than people used to obsess about god while those who control and create the discourse make some kind of profit off us "sheeple".