Book Burners

some things that are more like fascism than book-burning:

––travel bans on racial and religious minorities;
––concentration camps which split migrant families;
––fascism;
––the phrase "the transgender craze that's seducing our daughters";
––terfism.

— Grace Lavery 🐬 (@graceelavery) November 14, 2020

—————————-

actually what we could do is find copies of Abigail Shrier’s book IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE in our local libraries, rip out the interiors without consent, and install the texts of our own propaganda before sewing the jacket back up. stop this rubbish from reproducing itself https://t.co/dGYidLbUBd

— Grace Lavery 🐬 (@graceelavery) November 13, 2020

—————————-

The above chilling tweets, advocating book burning and other other forms of forcible suppression of opinion have recently gone viral.

Heine long ago observed: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (Those who burn books, they will also in the end burn people.)

——————————–

Grace E. Lavery is a post-doc Associate Professor at Berkeley.

GEL is a transexual, who is “married” to “Daniel M. Lavery“, a transexual who was born Mallory Ortberg.

So we have a boy who think’s he has become a girl married to a girl who thinks she has become a boy. One cannot help thinking that they didn’t really have to go to all that trouble: they could just have gotten together and married the way they were.

I remembered Mallory Ortberg. Over the years, I came across a number of witty little postings of hers and linked them here.

Obviously, both GEL and MO/DML are highly intelligent (though seriously screwed up), talented, witty, and erudite people who’d be a great asset at any cocktail party.

I’m basically tolerant. I don’t care what they do in private, and I agree that they are, privately, entitled to characterize their identities and relationship in any terms they like. If I knew them as friends, I expect I would politely refrain from expressing my own private opinion of their world-view and fantasies and would go some distance in humoring them.

Where I draw the line, though, is in allowing people this far removed from normal reality to define the culture and public policy. They may be talented and well-educated, but they are also obviously afflicted with grave psychological problems and they not only subscribe, but are fundamentally invested in, they have centered their lives and their identities around, a futile and essentially pathological fantasy. People with this grave a level of removal from normalcy and reality ought not to be allowed to occupy any positions of trust, responsibility, and public influence.