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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.)
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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.