Helen Keller achieved notoriety
not only as an individual success story,
but also as a prolific essayist, activist, and fierce advocate for poor and marginalized people.

She “was a lifelong radical,”
writes Peter Dreier at Yes! magazine,
whose “investigation into the causes of blindness” eventually led her to “embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism.”

Keller supported the NAACP and ACLU,
and protested strongly against patronizing calls for her to “confine my activities to social service and the blind.”

Her critics, she wrote, mischaracterized her ideas as “a Utopian dream,
and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”

Twenty years later she found a different set of readers treating her ideas with contempt.

This time, however, the critics were in Nazi Germany,
and instead of simply disagreeing with her,
they added her collection of essays,
"How I Became a Socialist", to a list of “degenerate” books
to be burned on May 10, 1933.

Such was the date chosen by Hitler for
“a nationwide ‘Action Against the Un-German Spirit,’”
writes Rafael Medoff,
to take place at German Universities

—“a series of public burnings of the banned books” that
“differed from the Nazis’ perspective on political, social, or cultural matters,
as well as all books by Jewish authors.”

Books burned included works by Einstein and Freud,
H.G. Wells, Hemingway, and Jack London,

Students hauled books out of the libraries as part of the spectacle.

“The largest of the 34 book-burning rallies, held in Berlin,” Medoff notes,
“was attended by an estimated 40,000 people.”

Not only were these demonstrations of anti-Semitism,
but their contempt for ideas appealed broadly to the Nazi philosophy of
“Blood and Soil,”
a nationalist caricature of rural values over a supposedly
“degenerate,” polyglot urbanism.

“The soul of the German people can again express itself,”
declared Joseph Goebbels ominously at the Berlin rally.

“These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new.”
openculture.com/2023/05/helen-…

Dozens of massive #data #centers humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland -- and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.

Now, a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok
is wondering whether it was all worth it
as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centers to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence.

Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland’s grid operator to halt new data centers near Dublin until 2028.

These huge buildings and their powerful computers last year consumed 21% of the nation’s electricity, according to official records.

No other country has reported a higher burden to the International Energy Agency.

Not only that, but Ireland is still heavily reliant on burning #fossil #fuels to generate electricity,
despite a growing number of wind farms sprouting across the countryside.

Further data center expansion threatens Ireland’s goals to sharply cut planet-warming emissions.

Ireland is a “microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade,
particularly with the growth of AI,”
said energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork.
apnews.com/article/ai-data-cen…

A reply to the critics:

1. “The U.S. doesn’t execute children.”

Officially, this is true, but only since 2005, when there were 71 people on death row for crimes they were accused of committing as juveniles. The U.S. executed 364 juveniles prior to 1972. Between 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, and 2005, it executed another 22 people for crimes they were accused of committing as juveniles. But this is only those convicted in court. Since 2015, the cops have killed well over 100 youths, many of whom were unarmed, murdered because of their race, class, or disability. These could be thought of as extra-judicial executions of juveniles.

2. “Most school shooters commit suicide, so there wouldn’t be any possibility of a death sentence.”

According to this 2013 article (popsci.com/science/article/201…), around 48% of mass shooters (not limited to just school shooters) died in their attacks, either by their own hand, or by the cops.

Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, who killed 4 kids, 1 teacher, in the Westside Middle School massacre, in 1998, were 13, and 11, respectively. This occurred back when the U.S. was still executing juveniles. However, they were imprisoned, instead, and released at the age of 21, according to state law. And then there is James Holmes, 30, who committed the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre of 12 people, in 2012. While not a school shooting, it was a mass shooting. And he, too, was not executed. He is currently serving 12 consecutive life terms.

#schoolshooting #massshooting #massacre #luigimangione #prison #deathpenalty #police

In "They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us," author Peter Gelderloos argues that a failure to learn from, and remember, our history is a primary impediment to liberatory movements. "Many of us have come to expect that each new generation will grow up unaware of the struggles that preceded them, having to make all the same mistakes and to learn similar versions of the same lessons. But what if it doesn’t have to be that way?"

Radical history-keeping is one of the interventions that a bookspace like Firestorm participates in, and this year our community read a multitude of movement histories, revolutionary memoirs, and collected reflections. We didn't just read—past and present members of our collective also contributed to the work of documenting our shared experiences, as in "Books Through Bars" and "Constellations of Care," two new collections created by and for movement participants. In other cases, we gathered together with neighbors to read and discuss, a practice of collective digestion exemplified by the six weeks we spent with Solnit's "A Paradise Built In Hell" after Hurricane Helene (a backlist title that sold faster than we could replace it for months, resulting in widespread book sharing and the unmonetized circulation of photocopied chapters).

Of course, we were also reading novels! Despite some misconceptions, Firestorm is principally a collective of fiction readers, with tastes that skew toward the delightful and unsophisticated. And while our community sometimes surpasses us, we saw a continuing surge of interest in horror, with many of our best sellers bridging the terror of the supernatural and the horror of existing on the margins of capitalist and colonial states. Finally, we'd be remiss not to shout out Margaret Killjoy's "The Sapling Cage," a witchy YA novel that sold four times more copies than any title at our store, in a few short months becoming our second bestselling novel of all time 🤯

Find our complete list of 2024 Bestsellers & Collective Picks at firestorm.coop/lists/2024-best….