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.
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.
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.
Sun (formerly or not) seems overall very fascist about trans. There was also the infamous incident when Bryan Cantrill (then Joyent, formerly at Sun) fired Ben Noordhuis (key contributor to node.js) for not accepting trans-compliant rewritten docs with appropriate reverence. Ah yes, those were the days. Silicon Valley at its best.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845286
http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
“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.)
Don Hopkins seems to be profoundly rеtаrded: he is clearly incapable of holding his end or a rational argument and reacts emotionally on anything which even slightly challenges his adopted dogma.
This is the reason why I gave up on arguing with democrats, it’s like arguing with spoiled toddlers.
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.
Mr. Hopkins must have a lot of money and time to devote so much energy to mostly anonymous folks (Lulu?) being not quite woke enough on the Internet.
Phil:
Off-topic but I am sure you will want to comment on this:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/new-details-emerge-about-female-pilot-rebecca-lobachs/
DEI pilot hire responsible for awful loss of life.
TS: Thanks for the link. If the instructor had identified the hazard all that he had to do was say “I have the controls” and then steer the helicopter himself. So it isn’t reasonable to blame the female beginner pilot, though plainly she could have done a better job.
Don is an odd guy. On HN he occasionally comments interestingly but also has a similar comment stalking history.
He’s also extremely enthusiastic about pie menus.
I don’t know if it’s the same guy, but there is a DonHopkins on HN whose comments are frequently flagged:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=DonHopkins
The political stance of his obscene and inappropriate commentary would support the idea that it is the same person.
Phil,
I have read that the female pilot was able to override the other pilot taking control, since she outranked him (Captain v Warrant Office), and this what she did. Is that possible?
TS: I was never a military pilot, but I don’t think rank applies in the instructor-student (even if a recurrent student who already is qualified) relationship. Also, you have to consider simple self-preservation instinct and the fact that the aircraft has dual controls. I recognize that those whose sex was assigned female at birth are generally considered stronger and better athletes than humans whose sex was assigned male at birth, but a terrified male instructor should nonetheless be able to overpower an unaware female pilot/student who is just lightly on the controls per normal.
Loosely related, my comment on state-sponsored NPR saying that there was no evidence of men having a physical advantage over women in sports: https://x.com/PhilipGreenspun/status/1640184342520508419
TS usually refers to me.