"A commercial for the NYT, which appeared online and in public spaces last week, features a subscriber called Lianna listing a few of her favourite things. Rather than raindrops on roses and warm woollen mittens, she mentions ‘Breaking the Binary’ and ‘Heritage in Rich Hues.’And then, shortly after, she is seen in a field, wearing a sort of wizard’s cape and flourishing a wand, ‘Imagining Harry Potter Without its Creator.’... Of course, ‘Imagining Harry Potter Without its Creator’ might just be a harmless intellectual or a creative exercise, like imagining a nose that goes missing from a man’s face and is later found to have surpassed him in rank in the Russian civil service. Or a pair of trousers that goes on holiday without any legs in. The absurdity might be the point. But I don’t think it is. This has been going on for some time, and various attempts to cancel the woman who famously lost billionaire status only because she gave too much of her money away have pinged gratifyingly off the force field of her not giving a fuck...."
From "The erasure of JK Rowling/Harry Potter would not exist without her talents. It’s demented to pretend otherwise" by Simon Evans (Spiked)(internal links added).
Here's the NYT ad:
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70 comments:
The... thing in that video is a freak. That's the left in a nutshell.
You have two tags for J. K. Rowling?
JK Rowling is heroic.
The forward-looking price... cost of normalizing the transgender spectrum through socially fashionable, politically congruent constructs. That said, deny the dignity and agency of women and men, and reduce human life to negotiable commodities. Deja vu.
What a bunch of assholes. If you don't like her, don't read her books. Go buy 1619 or some other progressive lie because what JK Rowling said is the truth, and YOU can't handle the truth.
is there anybody on the left, that's Not mentally ill? Any Body? Any Body at all?
F/k me.
What horrible people at the NYTs.
JK Rowling did the world such a service- creating the gift of Harry Potter and all that comes w/him. Him…
She’s beyond amazing. She stands for truth- and imagination. She coaxed my dyslexic son to read:0)
She’s strong.
And I’ve got her back- even if only in spirit.
You go, girl!
My NY Times digital subscription was $1/week. I cancelled it. When asked if I was sure I wanted to cancel, I replied I could easily imagine getting news without The NY Times.
Since the ad is all about independent journalism, there are plenty of other resources. In the time I had it, I didn’t find that much of interest that I will miss.
It’s a petty ad against a creative, successful, generous woman.
Harry Potter’s preferred pronoun is his not “its.”
“Independent Journalism” my ass.
I’ve seen this ad on Peacock at least 30 times (they seem to use the same half dozen ads over and over again), and I hate it every time. I don’t pay for peacock, so boycotting wouldn’t do much good, I guess. I just mute my TV during that ad and, while channeling Michael Scott, inwardly say, “You know what? I gonna start loving JK Rowling even harder.”
Retrograde bio-essentialism is when you haul off and kick someone right in the nuts.
Ms. Rowling has FU money.
The left is trying to eliminate free speech for her, to "level the playing field".
That video ad was interesting. It provoked in me the feeling of "yellow journalism".
I don’t pay for peacock, so boycotting wouldn’t do much good, I guess.
Comcast owns NBC.
If you have cable you are paying for it.
farmgirl said...She coaxed my dyslexic son to read:0)
Harry Potter was one of the series that got my daughter hooked on reading. She resisted for years and is voracious now.
Here's a little fun fact: Since Harry Potter is available in just about every major language, and because it was written for children starting young and growing along with the characters, the language and story start out basic and get deeper, darker, and more complicated as you move through the books. This makes it a great tool for language learners. I'm using it to learn Spanish.
Do black space mutants make up the core readership of the New York Times now?
Ironically, Wokesters are the most conservative (and literally racist) thinkers to reach the mainstream in the post WW2 era. However, their taboo against mentioning or considering biology created analytical incoherence in the Woke ideology.
For 100+ years science found extremely strong evidence for both Nature and Nurture.
Biology + Education = Behavior
We now also have DNA/genetic evidence and brain scans for males and females. HARD science.
I think it's time for me to bite the bullet and cancel my NYT Crossword subscription. The answer is always PRIDEMONTH, anyway.
Insulting upwards.
"Harry Potter" is a series of fantasy novels for young kids, and a series of movies, too, I guess. Kids like the stories. They like the characters presented. They like the adventure and suspense and excitement. It probably accounts for a significant number of kids enjoying reading, more than they might otherwise have done.
Is that something the NYT has to hate? What a dreary lot!
I can see a lot of what happened to academia, the media, and politics in that ad. Everything is about identity now. Merely practical questions about what to do as an individual or as a society aren't as interesting to us as issues relating to our own group. It's unusual, though, that people who don't belong to a racial or sexual orientation demographic take such interest in reading about the few groups that the Times caters to and obsesses about. Maybe they are just following the fashion?
Whatever you happen to believe, it's good to be skeptical about it, and not take as much delight in being brainwashed or pandered to as the woman in the ad does.
NYT readers and employees are just insane.
My eyes! My eyes!
My wife and I have a running joke about how the Girl Scouts always put the homeliest of their members on the boxes of their cookies. The NYT ad has the same energy.
I'm tempted to feel sorry for JK, but she's a total libtard on other issues. She'd be cheering if Trump was put in Jail or if 500 Protesters had been killed on Jan 6th instead of 5. Sometimes Symbolic Stalin kills a Trotskite instead of a Kulak. That's just the way the liberal/left works.
You see this all the time with old Liberal/leftists. They don't keep up with the party line, and they get cast out.
The Rowling extinguishment is only one of many headlines, each meant to intrigue us with edgy self-loathing. "Read the NYT and your head will be stuffed with useless ideas" is the message. Irising this down to Rowling/Harry Potter is a distraction. They don't want to eliminate Rowling. They want us all to live in a fantasy world.
I like the idea of imagining a thing without it's creator. Like imagining the news without the 'paper of record' being used as the paper of record. It would raise the IQ and factual knowledge used by our 'experts' and run of the mill opinionators with degrees.
Imagine if the majority of people actually realized the entire Russia Collusion hoax was a Democratic Party operation? Just imagine if we got the news without the NY Times influence. I can honestly say it'd be a better world.
On the other hand "conservatives" have been othering these people for a long time.
Now they are just taking their opportunity to other people themselves.
Wouldn't it be neat if some people in this thread could perform self reflection and notice this historical pattern?
To Liana and the New York Times…….GFY
It's a good thing I cancelled my NY Times subscription years ago. It was not easy to cancel. I had to cancel the credit card to stop them from billing me.
I don't watch TV so NBC is not a problem. My wife likes TV so Comcast gets our money. At least I don't see their bullshit and my wife is always running in to tell me the latest outrage on TV.
So long, Enlightenment. We hardly knew ya.
Those who believe they must condemn/cancel a person who creates work they admire because that person hold opinions that offend them are fucking dolts. Most artists--heck, most people--are going to hold opinions that clash with yours.
These self-righteous nitwits do not imagine that they themselves will inevitably voice opinions that offend that prevailing "correct" attitudes of the day (which are always changing), and that they themselves may be canceled.
"Is that something the NYT has to hate?"
What they hate is the lack of TOTAL ideological conformity of a prominent member of the liberal tribe. Rowling is probably as much a leftist as anyone subscribing to the NYT, but she refuses to deny biological reality. For that crime, she gets labeled a TERF (Trans-Exclusionary-Radical-Feminist) and becomes a nonperson. The revolution always eats its own.
That freak conclusively disproves the utterly unscientific ideological doctrine of human equality.
Whether a work of art or freak of nature she’s a beautiful sight to behold, I insist.
I used to believe that people like the person profiled and the NYT are either just plain fucking stupid, or massively ignorant.
I now embrace the power of 'and.'
I loved all the Harry Potter books. I remember when I first read them how scary they were. That was groundbreaking for YA fantasy. I wasn’t a fan of the movies when they came out but they’ve grown on me, too. Thank you, Ms. Rowling!
I do not like Harry Potter. But I do like her!
This post about Rowling, and the posts about Ai Weiwei and his father, are part of the same series. It's the same conformist Philistinism at work.
I was (and am) a classical music geek. I remember in my teenage years, reading a biography of Prokofiev. After that, I read about Shostakovich. It was eye-opening to the realities of Communism. Composers and other artists were always in danger of being un-personed. They could be truly "canceled" in the worst way if they betrayed an influence of Western ideology. Or if Stalin and his henchmen simply didn't like their work. Shostakovich would sleep in his clothes, in case the secret police showed up. He didn't want to wake and scare his family.
There's something about Communism, not surprisingly, that hates and rejects individual expression. Creativity and ingenuity are automatically suspect. Geniuses are always in danger.
In her own field, Rowling is a genius. Clearly, the Wokerati are playing the role of Stalin-lite in this day and age. And the NYT is their Pravda.
Rowling should write a new novel and call it, "A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism."
Isn't Lianna a bit old for Harry Potter? I've always thought that the series was more for the 12 - 15 year old range.
Circle the e-wagons. Journolistic jingoism, or, perhaps, jingoistic journolism reveals a Hutu vs Tutsi vs Hutu mentality. Bray on, I suppose.
I think you all are reading the ad wrong. "‘Imagining Harry Potter Without its Creator" does not mean imagining Harry Potter having been handed down from Heaven, with no earthly being having a hand in its writing. Instead, I read it as meaning "Imagine killing J.K. Rowling, now that the Potter series that we all love so much, has been written so Rowling can't f**k with our worldviews. Kinda like putting a bullseye over a congressional district, only much more direct and threatening.
The only drag queen I knew to speak to read the NY Post for Page 6 celebrity gossip and Cindy Adams. (I'm probably not allowed to say this.)
Comcast owns NBC.
If you have cable you are paying for it.
I don’t have comcast either.
However, so many corporations have gone woke and support this nonsense that I’m sure plenty of stuff my money goes towards is ending up in the pockets of these SJWs. Until my husband and I have enough money to move off grid, I’m not sure it’s even possible to not use the product/services of every single woke company.
No denying that the NYT knows its target audience and isn't shy about making it clear who's in and who's not.
If you cannot celebrate the impossibly irrational as perfectly normal, you must expect that the impossibly irrational in their turn will fail to celebrate you, and will do so in their trademarked, tried and true, unavoidable, impossibly irrational manner.
It's yet another iteration of "Reap as ye sow". Rowling's work is trite, derivative, and full of badly-glurge. She shoehorned in sexual identity BS after the fact, the way Lucas wrote out Han Solo shooting first. Why she did this, she'd have to answer--My speculation is that she wanted to "fit in" with her preferred company on the left.
Then, she expressed an opinion in contradiction to their preferred worldview, and here we are: She's in the process of being written out of her role as author of her own works, by her former thought-allies.
This is what the left does. This is what it is. You can see it happen, time and time again. Look at all the old-school feminists being written off as TERFs, because they don't follow the current party line, and object to women being written out of their own lives as women.
At the rate things are going, I guarantee you that you're going to see actual women edged out of everything by mentally-deranged males play-acting as "women". And, every one of the trained seals will applaud.
Leftism is a mental illness. You can observe that fact from things like this, where they deny basic biological fact in favor of what they fantasize to be real. Whether it's economics, "criminal justice", or "gender identity", none of it conforms with reality, and none of it works.
Of course, all the numbskulls enabling the nutters by not pointing that reality out, and holding them accountable for the actual performative value of those policies? They're equally insane to allow it, and equally responsible for the results. The Gods of the Copybook Headings are in the wings, warming up, as we speak. God help us all.
Imaging the world without its creator: the NYT dying in darkness.
“Harry Potter was one of the series that got my daughter hooked on reading. She resisted for years and is voracious now.
“Here's a little fun fact: Since Harry Potter is available in just about every major language, and because it was written for children starting young and growing along with the characters, the language and story start out basic and get deeper, darker, and more complicated as you move through the books. This makes it a great tool for language learners. I'm using it to learn Spanish.”
Ditto for my kid. Born in 1991, the progression of books perfectly escalated as their reading ability advanced. One new book every year. Everyone read it, and the kids competed to see who could get the book and read it first. When the books ended, my kid, probably starting HS by then, was reading at nearly a college level. This helped getting a Summa cum Laude in college, and a STEM PhD. I couldn’t ask for more. Those books were very cheap in comparison to the good they did us.
Imagining all that reminds me of a song I used to hear in the 90's on alternative radio about a detachable penis.
Imagining all that reminds me of a song I used to hear in the 90's on alternative radio about a detachable penis.
To be fair, I can watch “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby” without giving a thought to their director.
Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint should be thanking JK Rowling publicly EVERY DAY OF THEIR LIVES for her personally picking them for the lead roles in the movies instead of constantly bashing her on the transgender issue in interviews and on social media. If Rowling didn’t pick these three ingrates, all three would be nobodies probably working 40 or more hours a week in some dead end job. Instead, they are wealthy and picking up their choice of acting jobs and impressing on the world their lefty illusional thoughts like these thoughts were coming from on high.
gilbar said...
is there anybody on the left, that's Not mentally ill? Any Body? Any Body at all?
______________________
Surprisingly, yes. Many of the people fighting the Trans nonsense are leftists. I follow a bunch of them on the world’s favorite hellsite, Twitter.
Yes, svlc, that was King Missle. Sensitive Artist was another fun song of theirs that seems to loosely apply here, though not to Ms. Rowling.
What’s ironic is that the only person ever able to imagine Harry Potter without his creator was JK Rowling.
These are the same people shocked at the thought that a left leaning "artist" would be boycotted for political beliefs.
But they don't want a boycott. They want blood.
Feh.
Harry Potter was the key to our youngest son's love for the written word.
Larvell: word!!
Right??
tim maguire
My wife teaches Spanish--I can order beer in Spanish--and so I asked her if Hagrid spoke rural, lower-class Spanish. Nope. So there's some character loss there.
Potter without Rowling...
It's yet another example of Magical Thinking.
In my decades of experience (computer engineer, project manager, construction) it's common for folks to forget, or to have never consciously understood, the origin and nature of infrastructure. Sometimes in the sense that they lack knowledge of history, and sometimes in the sense that they lack knowledge of systems complexity.
A good example is sewerage. To begin with, that it is even THERE. Why it is important. Why it is the way it is now, why it needs money spent on it ALL THE TIME damnit because you don't want to be there when it breaks. Why it can't work perfectly all the time.
Most people have to be beat on the head to grasp this, because they, personally, have never had to deal with it. It's JUST THERE for them. Magically.
Same with Harry Potter. iPhones. Air travel. Clean water. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Electricity. Fire protection. Property rights. Grocery stores. Movement of freight. Universities.
I've speculated that the increase of Magical Thinking in the modern West is inversely related to the number of folks involved in farming. That number was around 90% in 1900, and is now below 5%. And there's nothing like keeping your corn, cows, and chickens alive year after year to focus your mind on the real, non-magical world.
The last image of her at a carnival was appropriate. The Times has become a kind of carnival.
This ad goes well with the stupid emails the NYT sends out. Its marketing makes it sound like Teen Cosmo.
Some people love picking scabs
It made the ad viral. I spread it.
Fred, I agree a lot but I have to disagree. Most farmers, whether 90 years ago, 900 years ago, or today, have been descended from successful farmers. People who were, on average, among the most privileged people on earth, people who exercised selfish dominion over thousands of dead animals every year, people who had other people do the hard work of killing even other people to keep their farms safe from incursions from people who, for obvious reasons, wanted those farms.
You know what teaches you about reality, whether you are one of those people who have never farmed or one of those who have?
Suffering and compassion. Suffering is free and abundant, and compassion takes, sometimes, no work at all, sometimes lots of work.
“And there's nothing like keeping your corn, cows, and chickens alive year after year to focus your mind on the real, non-magical world.”
Praise God for JK Rowling.
My escape to a magical world.
… and Church. Honest.
"You have two tags for J. K. Rowling?"
I went for 2 or 3 years without the ability to see auto-suggested tags, so I had to guess or research what the existing tags were. During that period, some duplicates got created, such as "J.K. Rowling" and "JK Rowling."
More recently, Blogger increased the number of tags it would accommodate in the auto-suggestion function, and I became able to see what had been hidden. So what I do now when I see 2 tags like that is put them both on the post, then after publishing, I click on the one I want to eliminate and then I can see all the old posts with the disfavored version of the tag and change it to the one I want.
That's how much I care about the use of tags to collect things in the archive. I don't know how many people enjoy clicking on tags, but I do, and I also care generally about the good order of the archive.
You'll see that there aren't 2 "JK Rowling" tags anymore. That's because using my method and spending about 5 minutes of my time, I fixed the problem in the archive.
Anyway, the 2 tags on this post — while they lasted — were part of a process I am using to get the archive in better shape.
Prof would make a good librarian/archivist. But oooooh noooooh, she just had to go to law school ;-)
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