Ever wanted to look back in time? This week, we’re launching a kind of time machine – a telescope so powerful it will help us see back some of the first stars and galaxies made after the Big Bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most advanced telescope we’ve ever put in space. With revolutionary technology, it will study 13.5 billion years of cosmic history and help humanity understand our place in the stars.
Tomorrow, Dec. 25, at 7:20 a.m. ET (12:20 UTC), the Webb Telescope is set to launch from French Guiana, beginning a 29-day journey to a spot a million miles away.
Once Webb launches, the journey has only just begun. The telescope will begin a 2-week-long process of unfolding itself in space before settling in to explore the universe in ways we’ve never seen before.
this Rowling thing is hilarious because now we’re being called Nazis by people who are running late to their ideologically motivated book burning session
Funny that you bring up Nazi book burning when this was the first one
This was the Nazi burning of the Institut Für Sexualwissenschaft. The Institut was the place where the term transsexual was even first coined and the first trans therapies (what wasn’t just conversion therapy) and medical care were developed.
The reason terfs and other transphobic can pretend trans people didn’t exist until 2013 was because we lost generations of trans history and knowledge in that event and the active suppression of trans history in countries outside Germany until, well, now.
The fact that you have the gall to make this comparison makes my Jewish, trans blood boil.
I’m just so fucking tired of people using the Shoah as a prop, but I’m especially tired of people who essentially share an ideological endpoint with the people who perpetrated those events use them to continue to harm my communities.
“The earliest entanglement of Nazi anti-semitism and transmisogyny occurred in response to the emerging gay and trans liberation movement in Weimar Germany. The earliest development of an organised effort for gay and trans liberation emerged in Germany in the late 19th century, and reached a new level of power in 1919, with the establishment of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin. The Institute’s founder was Jewish Marxist scientist and political campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was a committed organiser in the German Social Democratic Party, and headed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee–the world’s first gay and trans advocacy group. Hirschfield is credited with the coining of the term “transvestite” and “transsexual, and in his research and advocacy he was committed to opposing the eugenic homophobic and transphobic science of sexology that emerged in Germany at the end of the 19th Century, a science which had come to dominate state understandings of sexual and gender issues and which profoundly influenced the sexual and gender politics of National Socialism…
For his crime of arguing against this strand of eugenic science it is not surprising that Hitler is reported to have named Magnus Hirschfeld “The most dangerous Jew in Germany”, and Nazi activists regularly plastered his residence with posters reading; “Dr. Hirschfeld A Public Danger: The Jews are Our Undoing!”.[2] The Institute had been the centre of the early homosexual emancipation movement in Germany. Counted among its many achievements are: a scientific study of sexual and gender variance which did not seek to correct or cure, but to liberate; including, developing the first techniques for hormone replacement therapy and gender confirmation surgeries; special state-provided ID cards for people (then termed) transvestites which recognised their gender identity and chosen names, and protected them, at least legally, from harassment and arrest by the police; and crucially, a shelter and community for gay and trans people.
On the 6th May 1933, the Nazi student movement and stormtroopers raided the building, removed years of research documents and burned them publicly outside in the street. Many people living in the institution were arrested and sent to the newly opened concentration camps. Hirschfeld, who was on a speaking tour in Switzerland at the time, had his citizenship revoked and died in exile two years later.
Doubtless the political motivations behind the destruction of this institute were not simply based on homophobia and transphobia, they were understood to be a fundamentally linked anti-Semitic notions of Jews and the Jewish conspiracy. Hirschfeld and many of the scientists and intellectuals involved in the institute were Jews; Walter Benjamin even spent some time staying there. The Institute was seen by the Nazis as a hub for Jewish Marxist intellectuals and their nefarious plans to undermine the purity of Aryan racial biology and culture.” - The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project, Joni Alizah Cohen (2018).
