Re:J.K. Rowling Book Burning Videos Are Spreading Like Wildf...
by eesmith on Friday September 18, 2020 @02:11AM
(#24513462)
I ... don't think that's true?
I mean, I just did a search for "burn Mein Kampf" and found videos of people doing just that - do you categorize them as all having conservative, limited views?
A check of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents says "On September 20, 2010 the Pentagon bought[271] and burned[272] 9,500 copies of Operation Dark Heart, nearly all the first run copies for supposedly containing classified information." - I don't think you can easily categorize that as conservative or liberal.
The same list says "During the Libyan Civil War, copies of Muammar Gaddafi's Green Book were burned by anti-Gaddafi demonstrators" - again, does that mark them as having conservative, limited views?
On the topic of "freedom of speech" - it's well established in the US that free speech includes the right to buy a US flag and burn it as form of protest (bearing in mind burn bans and other general restrictions on burning). Surely it's also free speech to buy your own copy of a book and set it on fire, yes?
If you want to buy and burn 10,000 copies of a book which is currently in print, where there's no cultural or historical destruction, and where you aren't taking the books from other people, then ... what exactly is the infringement of free speech? You might even get a wholesale discount from the publisher.
> On Wednesday night, students at Georgia Southern University (GSU) ripped and burned copies of a Latina author’s book about a woman of color navigating life at a predominately white university. The burning happened after Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Make Your Home Among Strangers and a professor at the University of Nebraska, spoke at the university about the book and her personal experiences. ... The university decided to relocate Crucet to a different hotel outside of town after a crowd began to form outside her original lodging.
Now ask why one story made it to HN and the other one didn't.
I mean, I just did a search for "burn Mein Kampf" and found videos of people doing just that - do you categorize them as all having conservative, limited views?
A check of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents says "On September 20, 2010 the Pentagon bought[271] and burned[272] 9,500 copies of Operation Dark Heart, nearly all the first run copies for supposedly containing classified information." - I don't think you can easily categorize that as conservative or liberal.
The same list says "During the Libyan Civil War, copies of Muammar Gaddafi's Green Book were burned by anti-Gaddafi demonstrators" - again, does that mark them as having conservative, limited views?
On the topic of "freedom of speech" - it's well established in the US that free speech includes the right to buy a US flag and burn it as form of protest (bearing in mind burn bans and other general restrictions on burning). Surely it's also free speech to buy your own copy of a book and set it on fire, yes?
If you want to buy and burn 10,000 copies of a book which is currently in print, where there's no cultural or historical destruction, and where you aren't taking the books from other people, then ... what exactly is the infringement of free speech? You might even get a wholesale discount from the publisher.
Personally, I see this as a man-bits-dog story. Book burning stories are not rare. I easily found https://time.com/5698850/jennine-crucet-book-burning-georgia... from last year:
> On Wednesday night, students at Georgia Southern University (GSU) ripped and burned copies of a Latina author’s book about a woman of color navigating life at a predominately white university. The burning happened after Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Make Your Home Among Strangers and a professor at the University of Nebraska, spoke at the university about the book and her personal experiences. ... The university decided to relocate Crucet to a different hotel outside of town after a crowd began to form outside her original lodging.
Now ask why one story made it to HN and the other one didn't.