Writes Pamela Paul in "In Defense of J.K. Rowling" (NYT).
If my name were Rosetta, my go-to metaphor for persecution wouldn't be witch-burning. It would be stoning. But "witch" is apt because there's a new podcast, "The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling."
We'll hear Rowling herself, and she will be interviewed by Megan Phelps-Roper, who used to be part of the Westboro Baptist Church and was "taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights."
According to Phelps-Roper, Rowling is "looking around and realizing that other people are self-censoring because they cannot afford to speak up. But she felt she had to be honest and stand up against a movement that she saw as using authoritarian tactics."
As Rowling herself notes on the podcast, she’s written books where “from the very first page, bullying and authoritarian behavior is held to be one of the worst of human ills.”
Those who accuse Rowling of punching down against her critics ignore the fact that she is sticking up for those who have silenced themselves to avoid the job loss, public vilification and threats to physical safety that other critics of recent gender orthodoxies have suffered. Social media is then leveraged to amplify those attacks.
It’s a strategy Phelps-Roper recognizes from her days at Westboro. “We leaned into whatever would get us the most attention, and that was often the most outrageous and aggressive versions of what we believed,” she recalled....
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67 comments:
Lefties so need to find a way to bring Rowling back in to the fold. Their lives are just too empty without Hogwarts…
I mean, they’re never going to be able to afford a Tesla on their activists salary, so no big loss there…
…but Harry…
JKR is illustrating when one tells the outrage mob to go jump. No apology, no back pedaling. Just, "Sod off".
Of course having FU money helps a bit.
As noted here [rude language warning], Rowling has sufficient funds, along with strong anti-libel laws in the UK to defend herself against those who label her a Nazi.
Even the NYT's sees the backlash coming.
Paid Trans/Gay activists are setting trans/gay people in general to take the blame for all of this.
But it is wealthy billionaires like the Pritzker family that are funding and pushing this because they are trying to divide the little people against themselves.
I am not optimistic about people's ability to see through this.
The wealthy have always been able to keep the pendulum swinging back and forth. We will be back to the government punishing immoral behavior before long.
As long as the government has the power to punish something it can keep people in their place.
Look, witches gotta be burned to keep the rest of us in line.
If witches gotta be fabricated to keep the fires going, that's the price we pay for a progressive society.
Have to give respect to someone who gave up her job for the truth.
But it is clear from the article that she believes in burning witches. As long as she's convinced that they are witches.
Talking past the sale. Even if she were transphobic so what. They're trying to preserve the cancel culture even if it makes a mistake, by saying that no this lady's in fact okay, contrary to first opinion, but the cancel culture is great still. It's just that it was the wrong woman.
Witch burning as an institution deserves to survive.
This is an example of regression to the mean.
Those who found or join a religion or ideology often have to be different to stand out, and must be rigid to maintain their unique identity (e.g., see the earlier post today on Jews, work, and walls). The children of the founders follow their parents without understanding exactly why, which thereby often becomes superstition, dogma, and distorted versus the original intent. At the same time, half the children tend to be conservative/different from their parents. But rules must be followed and those in the group find a way to stay in it.
Over time any religion or ideology is a mix between true believers and uncomfortable tradition followers. Some would fit in another group and don't realize it, won't admit it to themselves, or can tear away from friends and family. So, some of those posturing as 'compassionate' in attacking JK Rowling are actually hyper aggressive and disguising their attacks as compassion. The only way out is for self-reflection, but their attacks are reinforced by the truly compassionate people around them.
Transgenderism has been the most effective propaganda campaign since WW2. They really are insisting that black is white and up is down. How long does this last?
So, trying to signal the fanatics to lay of Rowling since its impossible to cancel someone whose net worth is northward of a billion dollars and the IP she created makes massive amounts of money for corporations who don't want to see that revenue dry up. Especially now that there is talk of rebooting the HP franchise.
It won’t matter. The LGBQT community has been told to hate Rowling so hate her they shall.
On second thought, I don't think that anyone is trying to signal the fanatics, they're well beyond reason. The signal is going out to everyone else that it is ok to ignore the fanatics regarding Rowling and therefore the revenue generating IP can continue to be consumed.
I think Ms. Rowling's essay on the topic was terrific.
I think the fanatics are beyond reason because of things like this.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2023/02/16/transgender-cannibal-baby-rapist-put-in-womens-prison-near-mother-and-baby-unit-n1671005
But what Rowling has shown us about the kind of people that are the spokes-things for "T" can't be unseen. Like BLM, these are some evil folks, who are into destroying people to assert their dominance. And we've also seen the cowardice of many others (e.g., the Harry Potter actors) who will never stand up to bullies. Act accordingly.
I’m waiting for Rowling to write the humiliating death of Hermoine Granger.
Yes whom exactly are the fascist people causing harm here? The radical transactivists.
Have you noticed that the left constantly points to the danger of criminal attacks on its favored victims, but so far as I can tell, can never point to actual, verified attacks?
Since the left has been quite prolific in fabricating hate crime hoaxes, my assumption is that they are also fabricating threats.
AOC’s tirade against Libs of Tik Tok is instructive here. She cites a bomb threat against a Boston hospital, and she blames Libs of Tik Tok. I’d give it a 75% chance that the threat was fabricated by a lefty looking to discredit Libs of Tik Tok.
This ties in with yesterday post about the letter to the NYT. The strategy of the pro-trans movement is to tag their opponents as hating and wanting to do harm to trans or non-binary individuals, when in fact those opponents are trying to protect the children from being messed up for life. This would perhaps be more obvious to people if we were talking about, say, female circumcision rather than "transitioning." If a trend developed whereby school officials and other outsiders were pushing girls to undergo circumcision without the girls' parents' knowledge or consent, and a movement of parents (and other "extreme right wingers") arose to oppose this practice, it'd be a pretty hard sell to claim that the latter group hated and meant to do harm to the girls who were being subjected to the former group's efforts. The claim would be preposterous on its face. Even if some people believed the female circumcision was actually good for the girls and would make them happy (ugh), it'd still be an outrageous claim to assert that the parents who DIDN'T take that view were bad people for saying "no." But this is exactly what is happening now with the trans movement. They are pushing it in every way they can, to the point of taking parents completely out of the decision-making process, and trying to label anyone who opposes it "haters" who want to see children kill themselves. It's truly evil.
Using the term "Punching Down" is an insidious means of censorship. Whenever I hear that phrase, I immediately discount everything that person says.
And just yesterday the TRAs were taking the NYT to task. Interesting.
The Westboro Baptist Church was never what it was portrayed to be.
Fred Phelps was a lion of the civil rights movement in Kansas, and the aims and tactics of his church were approved and supported by the one of the Democratic Party's most loyal constituencies.
'You’re burning the wrong witch.'
Which implies there are right witches. Like all fanatical believers eager to impose their orthodoxy, progs gotta have their witches.
But this is the root of the Mob's Tyranny: JK Rowling's only sin was that she disagreed with the demands for wholesale acceptance, refused to obey the tactics and was insufficiently enthusiastic during the Two Minutes of Hate. This was duly noted and the purity testing commenced. Maybe people will begin to discover that standing up to the mob isn't quite as hard when there's company to be found.
>E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia,...After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, 'I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.' On Twitter she declared, 'You’re burning the wrong witch.'"<
Hmm, looks like it's Rosetta's turn to burn.
My best friend has an 8th grade daughter at a suburban Omaha school. She says that there are 6-7 trans girls out of a class of 200.
Nebraska Medicine sees that as a nice income stream.
Note the similarity with BLM. As a saying, black lives of course matter. As a political organization, BLM is strictly affiliated with the democrats. Thus forcing people to pledge fealty to BLM (like NFL players forced to take the knee) is an overtly political act of loyalty to one party. The taboo against saying anything bad about blacks means that one could not mention that BLM has sponsored shootings of cops, has taken millions that have vanished, and has abandoned their early reasonable call for police reform and moved on to defunding.
In the same way, the reasonable call to tolerate trans has morphed into people losing jobs for not using the right pronouns, XY persons being put in women's prisons and rape shelters, and children (<18 yrs) undergoing life-altering and permanent surgeries and hormonal treatments.
I'm eighty years old, live in NYC, and have never met a transgendered person. I've known tons of gays and lesbians, but no transgendered. If I ever met one, I'm sure I would be polite and respectful, but I've never met one....If a tree falls in the forest, etc. How can you be prejudiced against people you never interact with?
via Wikipedia
"Hogwarts Legacy is a 2023 action role-playing game developed by Avalanche Software and published by Warner Bros. Games under its Portkey Games label."
Just another piece of evidence that we have reached Peak Trans.
Bullying authoritarians are the core villain of the Potter series. If the trans activists weren't so reactionary to what JKR actually said, they'd see that THEY are the bullies -- not her.
And maybe they could self-reflect a little, and come to the conclusion that bullying people around isn't a formula for long-term success.
Meh, I better stop before I get myself cancelled.
Hold Paul, Rowling, the NY times masthead and editorial board, etc, to the same evidentiary standards you demanded of yesterday's letter. They should do a little reporting and evidence gathering, including speaking to some people who might disagree to understand why. Paul does nothing. She's lazy and sucks at what she does. Luckily for her, she's chosen a clickbait area to focus all of her columns on, so it doesn't matter.
There's a fresh new perversion extant: furries. From what I understand there are people who like to dress up as furry mascots and then have sex. The furry mascot outfit is like silk lingerie to them. I don't actually know any furries but the phenomenon exists. I can't see how this role playing hurts me or society but there's no denying that it's extremely ridiculous. I'm willing to accept furries with a shrug and a raised eyebrow, but, if the furries suddenly became militant and defined my raised eyebrow as a hate crime, my opinion of them would move from serene indifference towards actual dislike.
The trumpification of people.
The other good thing about the "stoning" metaphor is that it calls to mind the scene in Life of Brian that's full of women pretending to be men.
It won’t matter. The LGBQT community has been told to hate Rowling...
Except there is no LGBQT "community" and never will be. L and G are otherwise normal people who are attracted to the same sex. The other alphabeticals are largely made up pf mentally ill people or very dramatic drama queens who like to play dress up, like RuPaul. The mentally ill people mostly "suffer" from the fear they were born in the wrong body. My fellow Boomers may remember the cartoons and memes from our youth where the standard issue crazy person was portrayed as "think they are Napoleon." Now the go-to craziness is "I'm not really a boy (or girl)!"
This has nothing to do with the unfortunate intersex people random genetics have occasionally produced, perhaps one in a million or so, wherein a person has both male and female characteristics primary and/or secondary included. Lumping all these individuals under any banner or alphabetical arrangement is illogical and misleading. The craziest half-a-percent of our craziest population is driving this insanity, not any "discrimination" against a supposed affected class.
LGBTABC activists are not about truth, rationality or fairness. The leaders are about dismantling the "west" in service to the cultural revolution. The others are about varying degrees of stupidity and/or neurosis.
The remnants will belong to the CCP or the Islamists.
https://www.contrapoints.com/transcripts/jk-rowling
Here’s a nuanced perspective on JK Rowling that actually comes from a trans person.
Noted in passing: The young cast members of Harry Potter movies came out against Rowling, this despite owing their fame and fortune to characters she created. This is also true of the cast of Roseanne.....Compare and contrast this reaction with that of the cast members of Empire. Jussie Smollett's hate crime caused the finish of that show and the best payday that those cast members ever had. I can't recall any of the cast members explicitly damning Smollett for his stupidity....Political correctness is a powerful force and causes people to betray not only people to whom they should express gratitude but also to their own best interests.
Every once in a while I read something in the NYT that is actually a bit encouraging. But then I read the comments.
Kay said, "nuanced perspective". Not really
If it turns out J.K. Rowling truly isn't "transphobic" (don't you just love these newly minted absurd phobias?) I will be disappointed and angry at an authoress I have never read because that will mean she does not oppose a social movement that seeks to throw fundamental biology on its bonfire of the vanities.
Kay writes, "Here’s a nuanced perspective on JK Rowling that actually comes from a trans person."
I'm disappointed in your use of "trans person". Sounds to me like you're already semi-indoctrinated.
There’s no such thing as transphobia, and I don’t know a single person who gives a crap about adults being involved therein. But, keep it away from the children, and don’t expect me to embrace or applaud their dysphoria.
Sebastian said...
'You’re burning the wrong witch.'
Which implies there are right witches. Like all fanatical believers eager to impose their orthodoxy, progs gotta have their witches.
We all need witches.
You all are using a small subset of trans/gay people who are funded activists doing the bidding of wealthy provocateurs to attack and label and attack a larger group of people and castigate them as a group.
Everyone does this. We are all tribal. We are all driven by biological imperatives we don't really understand.
"Conservatives" have been burning gay witches for decades if not centuries. They are still throwing gay people off roofs in Muslim countries.
We all see the same hatreds and attitudes on this thread.
Ok Rosetta, do Dave Chappell.
- Krumhorn
I try my best to take a "live and let live" approach to life and other people, but it gets more and more difficult when the culture will punish me merely for questioning the appropriateness of calling this individual a woman, even as I hope the individual gets all the help that the individual so clearly needs:
Arkansas woman arrested, accused of making bomb threats in Oxford
Rowling's actions are serving an important purpose.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
Yes whom exactly are the fascist people causing harm here? The radical transactivists.
Who were the fascist people in the past?
I would like to see this cycle break.
Shorter Daniel12: "Rowling's not transphobic because of what she says, she's transphobic because WE say she is." Twas ever thus with totalitarians.
A thought popped into my head that a huge amount of this is also massive numbers of women that are sick of the gender-craziness keep looking for a chance to jump on a wave that condemns the gender-insanity they're sick of, but they don't want to be first.
They need an alpha female like Rowling to tell them it's ok and high to jump. That high profile immunizes a whole swath of women that are fed up but would be annihilated by the trans-nazis.
This is also why the trans-nazis are going after Rowling so vigorously. They always need to fight high-profile people that are telling people they're in a cult.
"Hogwarts Legacy success will spawn several more sequels, likely blockbusters, driving billions of dollars in future revenue."
https://www.barrons.com/articles/harry-potter-hogwarts-legacy-review-warner-bros-games-c7bb8917
The radical trans activists went from denouncing Rowling to advocating that people stop consuming the content that derived from her IP. Since the content derived from that IP is worth literally billions of dollars the PTB have decided that she is to be brought back into the fold. Expect Daniel Radcliffe, et al to make public statements that they were mistaken in their believe that she had committed thought crime.
The karmic irony, the progressive comedy, of feminists' gender ideology reducing women to the sum of their sex-correlated attributes.
Rowling is transphobic/homophobic in redefining trans- (a state or process of divergence) and gender (i.e. sec-correlated attributes) to conform with her religious ideation. She thinks that she can abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too. She's playing with a double-edged scalpel that assures a progressive path and grade.
she's transphobic because WE say she is
Up is down. White is black. Hole is whore. Choice is denial. Democracy is inclusive. Life is a "burden". Some, Select [Black] Lives Matter. Science takes a knee to the cargo cult, religion follows an ethical curve.
@Mike (MJB Wolf), I chose the term “community” because it includes the L and the G and the cisgendered who wish to virtue-signal by responding with spittle-flecked rage to anything that even slightly hints at imperfect conformance to the proper woke viewpoint regarding trans people. Solidarity, don’t you know.
Quaestor said...
I'm disappointed
2/16/23, 11:32 AM
I don’t care.
Correction: Fully indoctrinated.
that will mean she does not oppose a social movement that seeks to throw fundamental biology on its bonfire of the vanities
The psychiatric progress of phobias has a notably biased, even prejudiced perspective, a residue of social progress.
Camille Paglia before her, and they are not alone. Transgenderism is not a pejorative, but a reality. Trans/homosexuals have done a disservice by appropriating cultural artifacts in order to socially distances themselves. That said, normalize, tolerate, or reject?
'You’re burning the wrong witch.'
The entire series is about witches, wizards, muggles &magic.
It was tongue in cheek- IMhumbleO.
I’m a big Potter fan &have read &re-read this series multiple times. I love re-reading books. I get to meet old friends again.
Vilifying people stamps the ideology with an imprimatur of legitimacy that it would not otherwise enjoy.
It really serves to skip, or attempt to skip, that pesky vetting process.
Judging, burning, dunking, cancelling witches, warlocks, albinos, babies... fetal-babies and other "burdens". Forward!
Transgenderism is not a pejorative, but a reality.
I'm not sure what is meant here. The question of social afflictions is not a question of their reality.
J.K. Rowling hatred got me a free box set of all the Harry Potter movies from a newly minted J.K Rowling hater.
"People were buying the Rutle's albums just to burn them. Album sales skyrocketed."
I don't play video games so I'm not going to buy the Hogwarts game that was just released, but I did buy one of Rowling's crime novels as a token of support.
I also have come to love the Harry Potter movies, and watch them all the time on TV. I'm surprised by how well they've aged into movies that can be seen over and over again, like the first Star Wars movies.
"Witch" is the right word (the only word?) for JK Rowling because of course the world of Harry Potter is full of wizards and witches. A person who is female and has magical powers--like Hermione, or Professor MacGonagal--is called a "witch".
The radical left has always looked a lot like Westboro Baptist Church to anyone who had an appreciation for history. The difference is that no one outside the WBC supported them. The radical left was supported by the entire Democratic Party for years, and still enjoy a lot of support from people who should know better.
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