The real cancel culture


It’s moms.

Monday evening’s discussion was spurred by parents of a Riverbend student, who brought their concerns to the meeting.

The mother said during public comments that she was initially alarmed by “LGBTQIA” fiction that she said was immediately made available upon accessing the library app. After doing more research, she discovered a book in the collection that she found more upsetting.

The book, “33 Snowfish” by Adam Rapp, concerns three homeless teenagers attempting to escape from pasts that include sexual abuse, prostitution and drug addiction.

Oh no! The LGBTQIA stuff was just the tip of the iceberg! Down below we find stories of homeless kids who are sexually abused, which never ever happens in Spotsylvania, Virginia.

Don’t you worry, though. The school board has a cure.

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.

“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

There’s a solution that has never ever gone wrong in the entire history of humanity.

Comments

  1. davidc1 says

    As some German bloke once said” When you start by burning books ,you end by burning people “.
    Or words to that effect .

  2. kome says

    Of course moms are playing a significant part of real cancel culture. White womanhood and femininity has been weaponized to justify the silencing, marginalization, and extermination of so many groups of people throughout history.

  3. Pierce R. Butler says

    Which of the recent targets of our esteemed host has set his or her vermin loose here this afternoon?

  4. says

    We know this troll has strong feelings about rape now. So desperate to try to paint that on a perceived leader of an “other side”. This plus the homophobia and antisemitism, this behavior corrupts group it’s allowed in.

  5. says

    It’s tragic. I am so deeply hurt by this self-indicting Nazi troll that I guess I’m going to have to give up, shut down the blog, delete the archives, and go hide in a hole.

    Nah, not really. I’m kind of impressed at how oblivious he has to be to think exposing himself in this way is intimidating.

  6. kome says

    Aw, poor wittle white supwemacist keeps getting his messages deweted. Poor baby.
    Stay mad, bro. I’m sure that’s healthy.

  7. chigau (違う) says

    Are you quite sure it is not possible to diagnose personality disorders on the internets?

  8. says

    It’s definitely possible to note their presence.

    There is a feature that requires the first post from a new poster to be approved before their comments appear, that should help stem the seeming tide of freshly-created nonsense accounts.

  9. says

    @chigau 36
    I believe it is possible to diagnose things online. But the remodeling of it is complicated by the ableism, and you have to show the same level of precision as a professional and be able to clearly talk about how diagnostic criteria work and what a diagnosis means. Those are natural human behaviors in the criteria and it’s better to look to those as specific general areas of concern.

    It’ll be a mess but I think we are moving that way as a society already.

  10. Frederic Bourgault-Christie says

    The master race sent their sharpest minds folks!

    As for the actual article: I literally thought this had to be a subtle bit of satire, like a Jezebel joke article gone into the wild. Nope, that’s the actual Fredericksburg daily newspaper. But, as always, it is the left that censors.

  11. Walter Solomon says

    Book burnings and getting books banned from school libraries was a popular pastime during the Reagan era. Vonnegut used to be a big target.

    It’s good to see this country is moving back to a more wholesome, simpler and hateful period. /s

  12. whheydt says

    Back when burning D&D books was all the rage, IIRC, TSR offered to sell the book burners as many copies as they wanted. There were reports that they were willing to discount the books by supplying blank pages bound within identifiable covers.

  13. JustaTech says

    @whheydt About the same time period fantasy author Mercedes Lackey was getting a lot of nasty remarks sent her way because she had a trilogy with a gay main character. Her response? “If you’d like to hold a book burning, please contact the publisher for a bulk-buy discount.”

    As always the issue isn’t with people burning their own books, it’s when they take other people’s books (or the public at large’s books such as library books) and burn those.

  14. unclefrogy says

    clearly it is free speech and free press for we and not thee.
    I thought that was what the constitution established?

  15. birgerjohansson says

    Dispatches From The Culture Wars used to publish the more amusing hate emails sent to Michael W. It was quite amusing to unpack the spelling and the alleged reasoning in those messages.
    I think PZ should create a “bestiarium” with hate mail representing the worst spelling and the most convoluted logic of the PZ- related trollsphere.

  16. chrislawson says

    chigau@36–

    As a rule, I would discourage attempts to make psychiatric diagnoses based solely on online comments. However, just because you shouldn’t identify personality disorders doesn’t mean you can’t identify personality repulsiveness.

  17. chrislawson says

    birgerjohansson@44–

    In my experience, troll commentary is just abusive and unpleasant. Collecting them might serve new readers wondering just how bad trolls can get, but otherwise it doesn’t add anything imo (obviously this is PZ’s blog, he can do what he wants).

    The very occasional amusements (‘Get a brain MORANS!’) can be discussed as they arise.

  18. whheydt says

    Re: JustaTech @ #42…
    Exactly that. It’s often noted about flags, as well. So long as it is your own flag, feel free to burn it. There is a problem when someone chooses to burn a flag that belongs to someone else.

  19. dianne says

    Whheydt @47: Back when Brexit was still being debated, some leavers decided to burn the EU flag, not clear if it was one that they owned or they went to some public place to set flags on fire. In any case, they failed because of EU fire safety regulations and the flammability (or not) of the material used. Summed up the leave position. (Sorry, a bit off topic, but in the same vein of thought as the book burners, IMHO.)

  20. Matthew Currie says

    With regard to the bulk purchase idea above, it’s been done before. For an amusing bit of history, check out the story of Tyndale’s “heretical” Bible translation, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Though the end is as nasty as you’d expect, and might color your opinion of Thomas More, the middle is pretty funny.

    On the burning of flags, I’m willing to bet that the advocates of book burning are also all on board for the perennial proposal of flag idolatry laws that would make burning even your own flag, or even a picture of one you drew yourself, an offense – the very image of the flag being raised to the level of a holy icon.

  21. birgerjohansson says

    För fire safety reasons, we should have the book-burning far-right crowd assigned to the same vegetation-free travel pit where the flag-burning muslins have been assigned as they oppose countries that publish ehvil drawings. It would make a fun social experiment.

  22. birgerjohansson says

    För fire safety reasons, we should have the book-burning far-right crowd assigned to the same vegetation-free travel pit where the flag-burning muslins have been assigned as they oppose countries that publish ehvil drawings. It would make a fun social experiment.

  23. davidc1 says

    @48 The flag burners are not as thick as the britshitters who were living in Spain for part of the year ,who voted to leave .
    They thought they would still be able to spend the winter in the sun .
    Have you seen Laughing Spanish Guy on youtube ? The one where he says he worked for tory HQ is the funniest thing ever but this one is nearly as funny .