Check out this column in the Huffington Post. It starts
When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.
No, I'm not kidding. This has got to be the most insane Holocaust comparison ever written.
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7 comments:
I already saw Ed Brayton's take on it, and I expect Orac's Hitler Zombie will be along presently. Pretty much, it's mindless Luddism turned up to 11.
Am I missing anything by not reading the HuffPo regularly?
Honestly, the first time I heard they had named it the Kindle I did think of book burning and wondered why one would name a book reader that. Then I shrugged and moved on.
To make a a serious Godwinization based on that is really appalling.
Eamon, regarding reading Huffpo: Not really. There are occasional pieces worth reading but one is generally able to rely on other people to shift through the garbage to find them.
It doesn't look like a "comparison" to me (what's being compared?), but just a really bizarre springboard.
Does nobody think of kittens anymore?
http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/collnoun.htm
I reread the HuffPo article more carefully and found my answer. Never mind.
This article exemplifies the strange religion that is unconditional worship of physical books. Personally, the closest I get to worship is deep respect for free and easy exchange of ideas and information; paper, ink, and binding are only valuable to me as enablers of the recording and transmission of information.
I'm surprised that people who spend as much time reading as Kaufman and his like are so restricted in imagination and perspective as to believe that physical books are some sort of ideal which cannot be improved upon. If they happened to be around in antiquity, I'm sure they would be protesting any replacement of tablets (clay, not touchscreen) by scrolls, then I'm sure they'd protest the evil advent of binding as books replaced the scrolls.
Like Kaufman, I don't love the degree to which corporations currently control the content of Kindles and the like. However, unlike him, I flatter myself htat I have the perspective to see that once books really start to disappear, the electronic replacements won't be much like the Kindle, so his Kindle-specific Luddism will seem quite quaint.
I think that this, more man many other things that have been loudly accused of doing so, trivializes the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust, and for that reason I find it profoundly offensive. Much like people who said Hilary Clinton had been "raped" during the primaries, when in fact all that happened was that some supporters of other candidates said mean things about her.
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