In May of 1933, Nazis stormed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, and walked off with cartloads of books from their library, which they then burned, publicly. This is one of the most famous photographs of the pre-war period, illustrating their process for purging “Jewish” literature from Germany.
On May 6, 1933, Nazi demonstrators raided the libraries of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a German name that roughly translates to the Institute of Sexology. The Institute was a privately operated research space for studies of human sexuality. More than 20,000 books were taken from shelves and burned days later in the streets by Nazi youth groups.
A book publisher named Rubin Mass afterwards found a few scorched pages that survived the fire, and preserved them to remember the criminality of the right-wing mob.
They were from Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie. Hirschfeld was Jewish, gay, and a scholar, so of course he was hated by Nazis. Most people who know anything about the rise of Hitler’s regime know this — it’s common knowledge that the Nazis regarded anything to do with deviations from a Christian heterosexual norm as degenerate. You have to be soaking in the anti-intellectual, ahistorical circle-jerk of right-wing apologetics to be totally unaware of these facts.
Cue JK Rowling.
J.K. Rowling is once again making ignorant and anti-trans comments online. On Wednesday, the Harry Potter author’s name began trending on X thanks to an ill-advised post in which she denied the claim that Nazis burned “books on trans healthcare and research.”
“I just… how?” Rowling wrote above a screenshot of a nameless user’s post. “How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?””
I wish the murder of six million Jews, gays, transexuals, Romany, and political opponents had been nothing but a “fever dream,” but it wasn’t. It was a horrible reality that now a famous author of children’s fantasy books would like to bring back.
I’m ashamed to say that I contributed to her coffers years ago, by buying several of her books for my kids. That was before she grew the invisible toothbrush mustache and started openly courting fascists, though. At least I never paid to see any of those Harry Potter movies, and never will.
I hope someone sends JK Rowling.this and she reads it and rethinks her views.
The first part of this is quite probable, the second, well, dunno. Not so much. Yet hope so..
Siz million jews.
Plus another six million ‘untermenschen’ ; Roma, gay people, polish intellectuals, other individuals in German-occupied Europe considerd unacceptable in one way or another, the mentally sick, the delvelopmentally handicapped.
Germans that had become addicted to the widely available wonder-drug Pervetin (amphetamine, given in large volumes to soldiers). Teenagers that did not submit to the brain-washing and revolted. The list goes on.
There are quite a few scenes in the Harry Potter books where I thought: “She really didn’t think that through, did she?”
Ever since she started her anti-trans hate-crusade, I realize again and again, that she’s actually simply stupid.
In 1970, 25 years after WWII newspapers published a lot about the Third Rrich and its crimes. Plus the schools provided A LOT of the history (here in Sweden, maybe not so much in Utah and Alabama).
One thinks Britain should have had a lot of history lessons but Rowling maybe only read the parts about Spitfires and Montgomery.
J.K. Rowling who?
She has really walked off the list of people worth paying any attention to.
I never got around to reading the Harry Potter books and now I will never bother with them.
About all I know about J.K. Rowling is that she is a horrible person.
It’s kind of amazing how JK Rowling is way more sympathetic to the evangelical freaks who burned her books for being satanic than she is with the trans people who loved her books for the (apparently accidental) allegories to their lives.
In response, Rowling quoted a tweet that seems to be trying to trick people into thinking that Hirshcfield was a Naz, She’s just digging in deeper and deeper and is threatening to sue someone for calling her a Holocaust denialist now.
It’s no longer surprising for TERFs to get comfortable with Nazis.
It’s amazing how a concerted marketing campaign can make this woman’s sub-par Worst Witch knockoffs into such bestsellers that she thinks she’s clever and important. She isn’t even very good at what she does – writing fantasy books for children – so lord knows why she thinks she has something to say about issues she is clearly woefully ignorant on.
Also, I liked it better when the Nazis were just in history and fiction. Can we go back to that time, please? These new modern real ones are a distinct downgrade for humanity.
@Bronze Dog: just a minor quibble over word usage. We know Rowling is a TE, but was she ever an RF?
Joanne, for the love of dog: THE PEOPLE YOU’RE IN BED WITH NOW WILL NEVER BUY YOUR FUCKING BOOKS.
@Autobot Silverwynde
She doesn’t need them to. Remember it’s “I got mine, so fuck everyone else” and she’s long since moved on to part 2.
Back in 2015 or 2016, when I was volunteering for the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library, I came upon a donated book that had clearly been partly burned and then immersed in water. It was in German, a language that I do not read. When our rare books expert arrived, I gave him the book. He turned pale and said in a strangled voice, “I think this was from the Hirschfield Archive.” I said, “I thought they burned it all down.” My co-worker recovered and told me that some books had survived and that there was a group in Berlin that was working on reconstituting some of the archive. He found their website and emailed them. The next week we had our answer: not only was that book a survivor of that bibliocaust, but it was also the only known copy in existence of that title! The group in Berlin asked if we could sell them the book, no matter how damaged it might be, and offered us a substantial sum to send the book to them. All of us volunteers present that day got together and made what has to have been the easiest decision in the history of our organization: of course we would return the book, and of course we would not sell it, but would return that book to where it belonged, bearing the cost of postage ourselves! I carefully wrapped the book, took it up to the post office, and dispatched it to Berlin. A couple of weeks later, we got an email saying the book had arrived in Berlin. The book conservation experts working with the group there had determined that the book was too damaged and fragile to even be handled by researchers, but that they could preserve it enough to be put on display at some point. The group sent us a copy of a plaque which would be displayed along with the book, thanking the Berkeley Friends of the Library for our discovery and for returning the book to where it rightfully belonged. Although I only played a tiny role in recovering that horrible history, I will never forget how I held in my hands that book, the rarest of the rare, the improbable survivor of that bibliocaust. By the way, pretty much all of the donations that reached our organization were delivered anonymously, so to this day nobody has any idea of what happened to the book between 1933 and 2015, or how it finally reached us.
@14 anxionnat: that’s quite a story, many thanks for sharing. Who knows how that particular book even landed in America, and in which circumstances.
As for Rowling, it’s very puzzling how such a person, at her leisure and not needing to work since quite a few years, cannot dedicate at least some of her plentiful free time to the study of history (Hogwarts was a place of learning after all).
She might find stuff like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge
and more, and far worse.
I just impulse-purchased the huge collection of the Earthsea cycle by Saga Press, illustrated by Charles Vess.
I will NOT be buying any of Rowling’s stuff anytime soon.
One thinks Britain should have had a lot of history lessons but Rowling maybe only read the parts about Spitfires and Montgomery.
In fairness, she may only have been taught about Spitfires and Montgomery in the first place. Lots of the people in power in France, UK and the US during WW-II were quite sympathetic toward the Nazis, and feared and hated most of the same people the Nazis tried to wipe out; so after the war, they put a lot of blind spots in what they taught their kids about the Nazis. One case in point is that Afro-French blacks aren’t mentioned along with Jews, gays, Roma and the rest of their victims. And another case in point is the book burning: we’re told “the Nazis burned books,” but not that almost all the books burned on camera were from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and about LGBT people. It wasn’t until about five or so years ago that I learned that little detail. So if Rowling had made that comment back then or earlier, she could be forgiven for her ignorance. But today, of course, there’s no excuse for her continued ignorance.
I’m confused. Was Rowling objecting to the claim the Nazis burned books about trans healthcare and research or the accusation that she was so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender?
@17 seversky
It reads to me like she was bemused at a poorly-worded tweet claiming she was “upholding [Nazi] ideology”, but that doesn’t stop obsessive people on a slow news day from thinking they found another Nazi. Add in the credulous chumps who will retweet or reblog it and this lie suddenly has feet.
@seversky #17, @ beholder #18, to me it seems clear she is objecting to the claim that Nazis burned books about trans healthcare, otherwise her allusions to checking sources make no sense. And she most definitively is upholding Nazi ideology concerning transgender people.
@13: She got hers, but that seems to be shrinking.
Costco employee. We get Lego Advent calendars every year and the Star Wars and Marvel sell out. HP don’t. Not until we sell them at a loss. The more she runs her mouth, the more she snuggles up to people who won’t buy her crap.
She’s shooting herself in the foot and bleeding out but doesn’t want to acknowledge that.
This really isn’t that hard: If you find yourself agreeing with nazi’s, you’re probably on the wrong side. Downside is you have to, like, know shit to pull it off.
The main thing I find just appalling about her, is that the entire Harry Potter series builds up to a battle against the authoritarian “purebloods” by the literally named “mudbloods” and their allies in the magic world.
For what its worth I have a theory. Its epigenetic. Exposure to billions of dollars triggers a gene which turns billionaires like Rowling into fascists. They then pass that onto their children. The Trump dynasty is a perfect example. Just think if J.K’s books hadn’t been best sellers she might have been an impecunious left wing libtard like most sane people.
Raging Bee @ # 16: … almost all the books burned on camera were from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and about LGBT people.
At the first big bookbonfire, yes. Later they had some featuring, among others, tomes by that noted degenerate Charles Darwin.
Dril predicted her slide into Holocaust denial.
brucej @22: Do note that her protagonist was handed most of the things that came into his life without having to earn any of them- money, a house, two super-fancy brooms that were massively superior to the ones that the rest of the kids on the sports teams got to use, and even a personal slave. He also never took a stand against any issue that didn’t personally affect him or one of his friends. Such as slavery or the deep levels of social injustice baked into wizard society.
Hermione did take a stand against house-elf slavery and was mercilessly mocked for it.
Yeah, it was done specifically to show that she was a Very Silly Girl.
And the goblin bankers were very clearly meant to be standins for Jewish people (and one of the HP games features the goblins kidnapping wizard kids to overthrow magical civilization, and you get to own slaves in the game… such a wonderful whimsical fantasy world!).
Even before she started to slide into public nazi-ish behavior by going anti-trans, she was already center-right. There’s a very famous post from on the subject from 2017, which usually circulates as a screengrab which I am letting Mac OS X’s built-in text recognition transcribe (so please excuse any errors, although there are some typos in the original anyway):
@29:
Isn’t from Shaun video on harry Potter?
I was in the camp that very intentionally didn’t mess with the books when they first released and the cultural frenzy around them began, so the most of what I know of the story of HP and it’s moral landscape comes from being made to watch the movies many years ago, but along with all the right-wing dogwhistle tripe that is baked into the universe that others have pointed out, isn’t the ultimate culmination of Harry’s hero journey that he because a goddamn wizard-cop?
The problem I have with the Harry Potter universe is this: It’s normalising apartheid. If magic really existed, it would surely be about as immoral as it’s possible to get for the magical class to hoard their powers for themselves, as opposed to sharing them for the benefit of everyone including the non-magical class. Imagine a government that had woefully under-invested in renewable generation capacity deciding the easiest way out of the corner into which it had painted itself was to restrict the use of electricity only to a certain class of people; everyone else would have to live by muscle power and daylight alone. Before 2016, it would have been inconceivable; but the Brexit vote, the Trump presidency and the growth of open, might-makes-right authoritarianism have made it clear that nothing is off the table for these sociopaths.
I’m also reminded in a way of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamboat — another story that appeals to kids, and seems on first blush to be about an underdog making it against the odds — yet when looked at later, through the eyes of an adult, it becomes painfully obvious that the protagonist had Friends In High Places all along, and really was only slumming it for the sake of embellishing the story.
@32– ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamboat’ is a great typo!
Re Rowling: Isn’t the way house elves speak taken from stereotype parodies of southern slaves?
@15 outis: I bought copies of the Earthsea paperbacks for every colleague, friend and acquaintance with children but isn’t it a shame that film/TV dramatisations fail to respect the ethnicities of Earthsea characters.
I definitely typed “coat”! But on a Mac, so it probably got Autocorrected …..
The author should follow her own advice on checking one’s facts before blindly hitting send. I found the burnt pages especially interesting, though it’s difficult to read any complete sentences.
It is discussing a novel by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter which is titled Flegeljahre. Flailing Year? According to the internet, flegel can also mean cad. Perhaps it’s similar to fleas and flys in flues, as the book uses quite a bit of wordsmithing around the multiple meanings of words. A brief excerpt:
A delightful passage which doesn’t lose much in translation, and it’s quite amusing that English syntax is indeed, reversed from German.
There were two main ways that situation could have continued for JK Trolling – she could have perhaps realised that Nazis as a matter of ideology viewed both gay and trans people as less than human and ‘undeserving of life’, and so that made no difference for them when it came to persecuting their targets or destroying research meant at providing understanding of sexuality and gender. She perhaps might have thought to check reputable sources that documented that book burning, and what research and social programs the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft had carried out for a couple of decades prior to 1933. If she had learned something from that, she might have then thought about revising her opinion and apologising for her mistake.
But you know, this is JK Trolling we’re talking about, so she did absolutely none of that. She accused the people who tried to point out her holocaust denialism of being liars, and then presented a truly diabolical thread of twisted misinformation from one of the horrible anti-trans LGB Alliance hatchet men by way of doubling down.
“Facts.” They’re damn pesky things. Which “facts” are we talking about here? The ones that make people feel justified in calling Rowling a “Holocaust denier”? Even though the Holocaust refers specifically to the murder of Jews? Not Romanies, the disabled and not homosexual men?
The “facts” from your commenters, one of whom has made a great leap in deciding that the Harry Potter “universe” is “normalising apartheid”? This may have been parody, given that the commenter doesn’t know the difference between a boat and a coat.
Are we talking about such “facts” as that the transvestites of them time were not persecuted in the way gay men were, and were mostly straight men who could obtain a licence to dress as females, as long as they adhered to middle class, bourgeois mores of ‘womanhood’, for which, read ‘being ladylike’?
Are we talking about such “facts” as that despite some serious scouring, a grand total of two cross-dressers can be found who were put to death by the Nazis, one of whom was Jewish? Or such actual facts such as that in the ransacking of Hirschfeld’s premises, the names of some 100,000 gay men were taken away by the Nazis, gleaned from Hirschfeld’s research by questionnaires, which unlike Kinsey’s wasn’t anonymised?
How about such facts as that the entire cobbled-together “history” that trans activists have invented for themselves in the past fifteen years is false, made up on the fly, anecdotal, and based on an insertion of themselves into gay history where they have been shown, time and time again, not to have figured?
The entire true “history” of trans activism, which dates as far back as about 2012, represents a hijacking and a robbery of gay history, with some especially laughable vignettes inserted like “Joan of Arc was a trans man” for spice.
And all of this would be laughable were it not so serious. The ridiculous “culture war” Americans have gotten themselves embroiled in has blinded them to the travesty that is “gender-affirming care”, with the piquant irony that, having inserted themselves into and overrun the gay rights movement, these ghouls are making victims of children and young people who are mostly gay, very often autistic, very often traumatised in other ways often involving sexual abuse and violence, have a raft of other mental health problems and are some of the most vulnerable youngsters in society.
What is the answer that these people proclaim is the solution to all their problems? Knacker them with puberty blockers, used off-label. Give these often-abused youngsters the same drugs whose other off-label use is for the castration of sex offenders.
I have to ask: Are you mad? Have you dismissed as “transphobic” any look at the demographics of this burgeoning trans population? Have you looked at any “facts”? Evidence? Have you noticed that it’s been driven by straight — heterosexual men — with a cross-dressing fetish, who remain physically intact excepting a few who get breast augmentation, who like to justify themselves by pushing the idea that there’s such a thing as a “trans child”? That these people have hijacked and parasitised the gay rights movement? That this fits a pattern whereby every weirdo under the sun has attempted to attach to the gay movement, including paedophiles in the 70s and 80s, when organisations like PIE tried to advance their child-shagging agenda by hiding in gay activism, and gay people had to chuck them out? One relic of that era is Peter Tatchell, who is very ardent about “trans rights” to this day. He’s on record in print advocating for the great, liberating healthiness of children having sex with adults.
I’m reminded of Hitchens’ line: “The anti-life of [Jerry Falwell] proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend.”
Or “trans”.
What is “trans” anyway? In the scholarship, there are at least three distinct typologies. There are transsexual homosexuals. Deeply effeminate gay men who for whatever reason have come to identify as women. They have always been few in number. There are autogynephiles (AGPs). Men who are heterosexual, who have a paraphilia whereby they get turned on by the thought and appearance of themselves as women. These men until recently made up the majority. Also until recently, a part of the diagnostic criteria for this condition was that in “true trans”, the onset occurred in early childhood and persisted. To people well-versed in this stuff, the original ‘Dutch cohort’ was screened to remove people with other mental health conditions. Those checks have been dropped in the US. Now, the largest cohort is teenage girls. The demographic has flipped from male-born children to female-born adolescents, the so-called rapid-onset gender dysphorics (ROGD). Interestingly, the trans lobby has done everything in its power to deny that AGPs and ROGDs even exist, so determined are they to instill the notion that being transgender is something innate.
This simply does not wash. The approach taken in the US to young people presenting with this condition has been abandoned all over Europe because, having taken a look at the “evidence” for “gender-affirming care”, it has been discovered that, well, there is no evidence. They’re just sterilising mostly gay and autistic kids, ushering them onto a path of lifelong medicalisation, butchering them with experimental surgeries needing endless “revisions”, and leaving the ones “affirmed” — started young enough — unable ever to even achieve orgasm.
I’m sorry, but anyone with any real insight into this who still advocates for it needs to be hung from the rafters. And that includes you, Mr Myers. I don’t know what skin you have in this game but I’ll bet the farm you have some conflict of interest. Whatever you feel you have to tell yourself, your integrity is not worth a steaming shit on this. You could perhaps redeem yourself by admitting you’ve made a terrible mistake.
As a gay man, I resent in the strongest terms having had to put on my activism hat AGAIN to get rid of this utterly ludicrous, sick, twisted ideology and any association with me it may have, by the accident of birth that has deemed me not just gay but LGBTEEEE.
Spit!
<Annnddd…BANNED. Buh-bye, hater. –pzm>
Wow, #38 has somehow managed to convince himself that multiple ranting paragraphs of hate and ignorance = facts!
I’m only going to debunk the utter nonsense of~
No you evil twit, the Holocaust means ‘Burnt Offerings’,
and specifically targeted all of those groups and more as subhuman, not just Jewish people.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust
38 is just a set of feelings about things. Including the commentators here. A quote from PZ jumps into gossip.
lewmanchoo, you you have nothing but gossip about things like trans people and trans activism. You aren’t worth taking seriously if you are willing to make claim like that with nothing but your opinion, feelings about things and not those things.
You are person worth politically abandoning lewmanchoo, you got yours as a gay person, everyone else gets your trash gossip about other gay people and autistic people. As an individual I would abandon you if I knew you.
What’s with this obsession these people have with young peoples orgasms? It seems to come up quite often.
As for being one of the Europeans, transgender care is not abandoned over here. There is some fresh push to take away our rights but it seems that evidence based medicine is still on our side.
lewmanchoo sounds almost exactly like two other transphobic loonies I’ve argued with recently, Arch Grouch and 90Lew90, who were screaming about Tavistock and other gender-affirming-care clinics allegedly “fast-tracking” kids onto a conveyor-belt to transition them into hentai characters, flat-out lying about the Tavistock ruling (with the apparent expectation that no one would actually read the PDF when they cited it), and lumping all manner of wild vague accusations into a totally deranged campaign of fearmongering and hate against trans people, their friends and advocates, and all forms of trans healthcare in general.
@kkehno: If you don’t mind my asking, where in Europe are you? What have you heard over there about the hyper-hateful trans-bashing campaign lewmanchoo is parroting here? Are you hearing a lot about the Tavistock case? The so-called “leaked WPATH files” released earlier this month by some astroturf-environmental group? Weird body-mod surgeries on patients who may not have been sane when they consented to them? I believe the full nature of this disinformation campaign needs to be brought to people’s attention; so any information you can give from your end would be appreciated.
In fairness to JK Trolling (thanks for that, Xanthë), did she really deny that the Holocaust had happened? She may have done so elsewhere, but not in the particular brown gem of hers we’re talking about here.
@ lewmanchoo, #38
Ah, I see we’re dealing with someone who is too dim to understand that “transvestite” and “transgender” are not interchangeable terms.
As someone who-
A.) is pansexual
B.) neurodivergent
C.) was raped at age 3, and abused throughout their childhood
D.) and consequently lives with C-PTSD
-let me just say this to you: the only people “making victims” of people like me are people like you.
It’s people like you who told me that there were only straight people and gay people, and that anyone who claimed otherwise is a delusional liar. That fucked me up for a long time. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, because I knew I was attracted to both men and women, and yet how could I be? Everyone I knew said it had to be one or the other. I thought I was broken.
It’s people like you who, when I couldn’t act “normal,” told me that I was just a lazy brat who needed a good beating to straighten them out. Then they gave me a good beating and when, lo and behold, I still didn’t magically become neurotypical, beat me some more.
It’s people like you who made sure that I didn’t learn enough about sex and sexuality to understand that I had been raped until I was a teenager. I believed the rapist when he told me that my parents had told him to do that to me to punish me. They already hit me whenever I stepped out of line, and locked me in the dark room with the monsters- what he did to me didn’t seem out of step with that. So he got away with it, and who knows how many other children he raped after that. I know of at least one, because she was in the room when he raped me, and it’s a pretty safe bet that his son was also his vicitm. So, thanks for that.
It’s also people like you who told me that I had to be a man because I have a penis and, if I’m not, then I’m a sick freak fit only to be locked up and tortured into fitting into your narrow worldview. Well, been there, done that, and though I really tried for over three decades to be one, I’m not and never have been a man.
Who wouldn’t be a little nuts, after putting up with people like you for nearly 40 years? Certainly it would take a stronger soul than I. More than that, though, I’m pissed. All this shit that people like me have had to put up with because of tiny-minded bigots like you just fills me with smoldering fury. Accordingly…
…I have no doubt that scum like you would kill everyone like me, if given half a chance and a large enough mob to hide behind, but understand that you wouldn’t be the first to try for my life.
And yet, I’m still here. We, trans and nonbinary people, are still here. We always will be. So take your tiki torch and fuck off, you Nazi coward.
European person living in Europe. Residing in Finland that previously had kinda left leaning government that improved things for trans folx excluding trans youths. Current government is really right leaning so there is strong fear of things moving back but currently they seem to be focused of making life difficult for workers unions, poor people and immigrants.
I tend not read too much of what happens in the Terf island due it having less effect on broader Europe bc of the brexit. So the Tavistock case is not that familiar with me and I had to google to find out what it is all about. Issue of puberty blockers is hot issue here too tho. For me personally, I was ton more worried when the Italy last year denied parental rights on rainbow families. Luckily it seems that other countries have not followed their example.
Hi Raging Bee,
What she did is technically described as Holocaust revisionism, sometimes also known as ‘soft Holocaust denial’. This doesn’t mean she is denying the Holocaust, but she is minimising the extent of it, and denying that it affected all of the victims that it actually did.
The facts seem fairly clear. Both homosexuals and transvestites (direct translations of the German terms used in the 1930s) were classified and targeted by the authorities under the ideology of ‘Lebensunwertes Leben’, which I very loosely translated above as ‘undeserving of life’. The authorities didn’t particularly care whether a given offender was homosexual or transvestite (or both), nor did they care whether the offence had been committed under section 175 (sodomy) or section 182 (cross-dressing), for the purposes of the ideology they were all classified as degenerates and sexual criminals, and so would be assigned a pink triangle when sent to a concentration camp (if they were ‘Aryan’) or an extermination camp (if they were Jewish or Roma).
To say that no trans people existed in the successor state to Weimar Germany, which had both a flourishing transvestite/cross-dressing community as well as people who had undergone medical transitions, is a Holocaust-revisionist lie.
To say that no trans people were persecuted and exterminated in the camps is a Holocaust-revisionist lie.
To say that there was no research into gay and trans people that was burned in a huge bonfire at the Babelplatz on 6 May 1933 is a Holocaust-revisionist lie.
I hope that makes that a little clearer.
As a corollary; it is therefore unarguably obvious that the comment that followed directly my first comment above, and whose author was swiftly thwacked with PZ’s almighty banhammer, was engaging in Holocaust revisionism. No question about it at all.
[hey Xanthë]
Xanthë: Thanks for the clarification. Also, thanks for wading through JK Trolling’s brown gem collection so the rest of us won’t have to (as much).
[hi John; how you doing, well I hope. I’m well, but somewhat discombobulated by social media at present, as both of the main platforms I used to enjoy have become unusable and unbearable algorithmic hellscapes for me.]
In the interest of precision – I note two things about my previous comments that I would wish to finesse, if FTB allowed an edit window to revise comments (which thankfully it doesn’t!).
Comment 37, in the second paragraph I would now substitute ‘holocaust denialism’ with ‘holocaust revisionism’ for the sake of accuracy, given the argument I went on to advance in the beginning of comment 47.
And in comment 47, obviously the ransacking of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft started on the morning of 6 May and the bonfires several days afterwards (a very minor point that can be rectified by substituting ‘after 6 May’ for ‘on 6 May’).
Raging Bee’s comment 43 cites a commenter 90Lew90 which would seem to be a sockpuppet of the recent interloper here. I would also note that besides Holocaust revisionism, the ban-evading pseudonym chosen by the troll in this thread seems to be a subversively racist one, if it is referencing the supervillainous Dr Fu Manchu from the ghastly crime novels by Sax Rohmer. If I were PZ, I would have chosen to disemvowel the comment because, you know, publishing holocaust revisionism is a crime in certain jurisdictions like Germany, and a recent trial in Köln ruled that this particular type of revisionism that denies that trans people (who were at the time, let us not forget, called ‘transvestiten’ rather than transgender) were also victims of the holocaust is subject to that law.