Don't Burn This Book (Rubin)

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, by Dave Rubin (2020)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

Walking from the anime shelf at the library toward the science fiction books, I was passing by the 300 section when I spied the words DON'T BURN THIS out of the corner of my eye. Stickers were covered the word "BOOK" on the spine. I stopped and pulled it from the shelf. I saw the title with the unlit wooden match on it. A striking cover (so to speak) that caught my attention. The subtitle "Thinking for Yourself" goes against the grain of all social media (and a lot of mainstream media) unless what you think for yourself agrees with without everyone else thinks.

The oddest part was that I didn't know who Dave Rubin was. I recognized the name, probably heard it online. The funny thing, I thought, was that if he was the person I was thinking of, he was a liberal. A title like this I'd expect from someone more right-leaning. (The jokes write themselves -- my first thought was to type Mark Levin here, but he wouldn't have a title that was so imflammatory. He's more on the nose with a title, I believe.)

So I checked it out, and as I suspected, Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report is, in fact, a liberal, but one of the Ed Koch mold. Ed used to bill himself as a "liberal with sanity" and who believed if you agreed with him more than 90% of the time, you should get your head examined.

Rubin states his opinions right off the top, what he believes and why he believes it. Some of these positions could have him dismissed as an "alt-right loonie" from the people he's not in line with. The rest are classical liberal positions. And by classical liberal, he's going back a few years.

It was an interesting read, particularly when illness nearly sidelined him and the "Rubin Report" and how a side comment to a guest led to a year-long tour on the lecture-circuit as the opening act to a self-help guru. It changed his life.

There wasn't anything in the book that was life-changing for me, but plenty of it was life-affirming, such as knowing that there are other people who would rather discuss and debate then name-call and cancel.

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