A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts

Happy Independent Bookstore Day to those who celebrate. A follow-up to Why does every “independent” bookstore have the same political point of view?

I posted the following images on Facebook with no words other than “A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts..” (neglected to include a third period for the ellipsis)

The results were far more dramatic than I had expected. Let’s look at only the comments on a single photo:

Don Hopkins, a software engineer old enough to have worked at Sun Microsystems, kicked off the thread:

(I don’t know anything about Lulu DeParis. I think that she lives in Maskachusetts, but this may not be her real name. And, in fact, I don’t know with any certainty that Lulu DeParis is a she, other than the inference from the name “LuLu”.)

The thread continued despite nobody having any idea why “LuLu” had reacted to the photo (maybe it was a mistake?).

The software expert says “obviously she wanted…”:

I unwisely offer an explanation of why pictures relating to Rainbow Flagism are interested (“Never complain, never explain”, said the pre-Islamic British, and how right they were!):

Don Hopkins then trots out a hero/heroine of transgenderism from the world of nerds. Seth Gordon, a Maskachusetts-based software engineer (his/her/zir/their profile says “Studied Women’s Studies Minor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)”), chimes in with the assumption that the residents of Maskachusetts are, indeed, as intelligent as they claim to be:

I point out that folks in MA set up COVID-tagged death rate as the measure of a group’s intelligence and, by that metric, the residents of MA are not intelligent. The reference to a transistor nerd, of any gender ID, gives me an opening to cite William Shockley:

Don Hopkins doesn’t seem to read the “Classically” part of my statement as referring to the dark past and also “a person” as applying to 100 percent of those who are gender-confused:

Don produces some pictures from the late 1970s when VLSI design rules were fat (3000 nm (“3 microns”) vs. 3 nm today) and electrical engineers were thin:

Mark Day, MIT PhD, pronouns on his LinkedIn profile, chimes in to note that I am “wildly prejudiced”. Don Hopkins pulls in David Levitt, last seen here in Did Albert Einstein ever say anything about empathy? and notes that I am “a hateful bully”:

What is the opposite of being a “hateful bully”? Going back to all of someone’s recent Facebook posts and asking “do you hate gay people as much as you hate trans people? Why or why not?”:

He posted the same question as a comment on this post, which is literally about the weather:

(My response: “I certainly hate whoever was responsible for the steady rain and high-30s temps that afflicted me during my April visit to Boston!”)

I’m sure that Don Hopkins’s opinions of me are substantially correct, but I do find it interesting that pictures, without comment, of the righteous lifestyle are so upsetting to the righteous. You’d think that they’d be proud of their Rainbow-/mask-enhanced streetscapes.

6 thoughts on “A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts

  1. Thank you for your service.

    One of the more annoying aspects of the movement is that the super intelligences who embrace it couldn’t come up with an unambiguous, agendered singular pronoun and instead justify the use of the jarrring and confusing “they” based on it supposedly having been used that way in olden times. Unclear why society should be burdened with disambiguation when they is used singularly instead of the community accepting that “he” can also be used ambiguously to refer to he/she/ze/etc.

  2. Syn Microsystems was known for its unbalanced people including some alien conspiracy co-founder proponents, before conspiracy theories were true. It lived off taxpayer -subsidized college unix workstation mass order racket and large corporation unassailable buggy unix cult tech gurus who never had to face end users. Way more dangerous the the scientologists who at least make great movies.
    I would take a protection order from that hopkins dude.

    • perplexed: As noted below, I think Don Hopkins has an average point of view for a progressive Democrat. He is just less filtered in presenting that point of view. It’s a little like the Democrats who are careful to say that they don’t hate Jews, but only are obsessed with “Anti-Zionism”. In fact, they hate Jews (at least Israeli Jews) as much as anyone who ever said “I hate Jews”, but they have a filter where they don’t say “I hate Jews”. Don, apparently, has an inoperative filter.

  3. “Don Hopkins” sure seems like an awful human being. Do you know him? What’s he doing on your Facebook page if not?

    • hilitai: I think that his personality is likely pretty close to the average for a Massachusetts Democrat, but less filtered. (At least half of the MA Democrats whom I know are angry enough to kill Donald Trump if they could find a way to get away with it (i.e., it is only personal cowardice that is holding them back from assassination).) As with Lulu DeParis, I don’t think that I’ve ever met Don Hopkins in person. I have a dim memory of him as a reader of one of my web sites 25+ years ago.

      Democrats today can’t tolerate people with inflexible slow-motion minds like mine. From a Democrat point of view, a morally acceptable human was anti-welfare, pro tax rate cuts, and anti-gay marriage during the Clinton administration (i.e., aligned with Bill Clinton) and then did a 180 on all of these issues by the time Joe Biden was led onto the stage. (I’m against gay marriage today, just as Bill Clinton was in the 1990s, but not because I have anything against our 2SLGBTQQIA+ brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters. I’m against any kind of government-recognized marriage because the result is litigation and I don’t think that ordinary citizens should be forced into the courts.)

  4. Oh so, you ‘neglected’ an ellipsis here: “A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts..”

    But not here: The software expert says “obviously she wanted…”:

    This obviously means there something hateful you have against dots! Maybe you imply an existence of a white dot in the first instance, not a black one.

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