I’m really interested in the question of discernment. I think of this scene from one of your books. It was “Harry Potter in the Order of the Phoenix,” where Hermione, the hero, and Professor Umbridge, who was clearly in the wrong, have this showdown in class. Hermione says in a moment of defiance that she disagrees with something in her textbook and Umbridge berates her like, who are you to disagree with this expert who wrote this textbook and punishes her. Now to anyone reading this, it is so frustrating and unjust. But I venture to say that no one thinks they are the Umbridge.
After Rowling's quick outburst, quoted above, Phelps Roper continues: "And some people see you as the Umbridge. You have these younger critics online and they see Hermione as standing up to an older person with power and they see themselves as standing up to you."
Rowling: "Yeah. And I understand because they’ve told me very explicitly. Why they have an interpretation?!"
Phelps Roper: "How do you know if you are a Hermione or an Umbridge?"
Rowling:
Well, if you’re having a lot of fun doing it and getting a huge sense of self satisfaction out of it, then I do believe you maybe want to stop and think, “am I getting a huge ego rush out of this?” That would be a good question to ask yourself. You know, is this giving me pleasure? Because I can say from my heart none of this has given me pleasure. It has given me anxiety. It has made me at times feel vulnerable. So although I don’t regret anything, I’ve had concerns from my family’s safety. Some of the threats have not been too amusing to me. There has been fallout in my life inevitably. I still don’t regret standing up, but it certainly hasn’t given me pleasure on any level.
That last remark of Rowling's reminds me of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" — Rule #6 to be exact:
The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
But Rowling's rule — which is emphatically not a rule for radicals — is: If you're enjoying a tactic, stop and question yourself.
A corollary rule: When your antagonists seem to be enjoying themselves, know that they are embarrassingly stroking their own ego.
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"When your antagonists seem to be enjoying themselves, know that they are embarrassingly stroking their own ego."
Which is a nice thing for nice people to know. Meanwhile, the antagonists--in practical modern terms, aggressive progs--go on unembarrassed. They define ego by serving the cause. They will seize power and destroy the culture BAMN.
It would be nice to live a in a world that runs on JKR/AA rules. This is not that world.
Rowling tapped into the rule for real prophets
Jeremiah 20:7-11
7 You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived;
you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long;
everyone mocks me.
8 Whenever I speak, I cry out
proclaiming violence and destruction.
So the word of the Lord has brought me
insult and reproach all day long.
9 But if I say, “I will not mention his word
or speak anymore in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.
10 I hear many whispering,
“Terror on every side!
Denounce him! Let’s denounce him!”
All my friends
are waiting for me to slip, saying,
“Perhaps he will be deceived;
then we will prevail over him
and take our revenge on him.”
11 But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior;
so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail.
They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced;
their dishonor will never be forgotten.
My personal philosophy of "live and let live" is precisely because I don't believe it is my roll to judge others. If you feel better by dressing as a woman, or cutting your dick off...fine. Just don't go around encouraging children to cut their dicks off. Don't tell me what pronouns I have to use, don't call me a bigot because I don't want to fuck a woman pretending to be a man.
Well, if you’re having a lot of fun doing it and getting a huge sense of self satisfaction out of it, then I do believe you maybe want to stop and think, “am I getting a huge ego rush out of this?” That would be a good question to ask yourself. You know, is this giving me pleasure?
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as thought-conversation leader every 'teacher' should be doing this
are there not Umbridges in Faculty Lounge? = DEI
If you're enjoying a tactic, stop and question yourself
If you enjoy a tactic it’s a sure sign you are being ruled by your emotions.
Everyone, whether mortal god or goddess, expert, advocate, activist, democratic/dictatorial, or lunatic fringe, is entitle to their own faith, to define reality that matches their religious prescriptions, their fluid identity, and feel unburdened through shared/shifted responsibility.
Hermione is fired up with her sense of justice, of defending her friends, of taking a brave stand against someone with the power to punish her. What makes Rowling think her opposition will ever see themselves as anyone but Hermione? She wrote an obnoxious, overbearing twit and made her a hero. She glorified the attitude that now gives her anxiety.
The underlying logic of this position is that "correctness" can be determined by an examination of emotions. In any conflict, the person who feels worst is in the right. That is, of course, what they teach at Stanford Law School. But what if Stanford Law School is Umbridge?
Sorry to change the literary comparison, but I remember reading a quote from a Hillary supporter in late 2016:
"We worked our butts off through the campaign thinking we were Katniss Everdeen (from the Hunger Games series) en route to victory with a noble cause, only to wake up after election day to realize we were President Snow and The Capital all along"
Moral of the story: Be careful when you perceive yourself to be the hero from your favorite fiction (unless it's George Smiley!)
She was a young woman with wisdom who wrote from the heart. Fascinating how the entitled young nutballs feel they own Rowling’s characters, they are the heroes and she’s the villain of her own story. Not an implausible premise but one contradicted by everything Rowling has done and said while under this tremendous stress.
Is the hole worth the dig?
All well and good, but Rowlings words won't mean anything to the ego strokers who think that there is no higher cause than pumping up their own egos.
Hermione says in a moment of defiance that she disagrees with something in her textbook and Umbridge berates her like, who are you to disagree with this expert who wrote this textbook and punishes her. Now to anyone reading this, it is so frustrating and unjust.
Gosh, you mean like banning people from social media because they said an "expert" was wrong, or disagreed with the "expert" claims.
Professor Umbridge, your mirror is calling
I highly recommend "Twelfth Night" (1985). Dolores Staunton, who played Prof. Umbrudge, plays Maria.
maybe want to stop and think
stop and question yourself
stop to think, stop to question
Something to consider, about all of this.
You look at what's going on in Ukraine, and how the Russian military there is dissolving into chaos. Nobody anywhere along the line from the lowest soldier up to Putin reports the truth of things... Everyone knows that everyone else is lying, but because there's this collective agreement on the narrative about "Russia Stronk! Russia Right!!", they're all going along with it, marching off the cliff into disaster like so many lemmings.
The average Russian officer has to know how corrupt the system is; they've grown up in it, take advantage of it. Yet, they all behave as though everything they're told is true; they all plan their operations as though what they are told about support arms and supplies are true; they refuse to plan around what they have to know are lies and things that aren't going to happen.
This is the legacy of seventy years of lies under the Soviets. The Soviet Union conditioned everyone inside it to believe the lies, because if they ever dissented...? Off to Siberia. Or, worse.
So, the Soviet Union was the Empire of the Lie, and conditioned all of its inhabitants to believe in the lie, even though they knew better. They can't seem to function outside the framework; the officers planning these death marches into the Ukrainian's kill zones have to know that the supporting artillery won't be accurate or plentiful enough, yet they still send their men out to die. The men go, knowing that those things they're promised won't happen, yet they go out to die nonetheless.
This mentality began under the Soviets. The lies were either mouthed properly, or you and your family suffered. This is precisely the world that the "woke" are trying to impose on us: "This man is a woman!!!", when you can plainly see he's got a beard. You don't dare contradict a thing any of these self-anointed assholes has to say, or you will get cancelled. This is a society-wide madness, an "Emperor with No Clothes" situation, and it's all being deliberately done by the people behind "woke", because they know that once they have you nodding along with the lie, that man is woman and little girls are boys, then you'll nod right along with the idea that you ought to burn your neighbor's houses down because they have Trump signs out in front.
Make no mistake about it: We are, as a nation, being conditioned for something. When that something comes, you likely won't wake up from the aftermath until it's too late to prevent it.
The communists were liars, start to finish. So were the Nazis. So is Antifa. So is "woke".
The comparison to Professor Umbridge is silly season.
JKRowling never claimed to be an "expert" in transgenderism.
Meanwhile, there was this exchange the other day between Riley Gaines and anthropologist:
RG: "If you were to dig up… 2 humans… 100 years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?"
"No."
*CHAOS*
"I'm not sure why I'm being laughed at if I'm the expert in the room. ... I have a PhD!"
It wasn't that hard to find a professor Umbridge.
“Have any of you been to anthropological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I’m just saying, I’ve got over 150 years of data, I’m just curious as to why I’m being laughed at,” he said before later declaring, “I have a PhD!”
He cannot tell the sex of a skeleton. He says.
@Nancy -- haha it's Imelda Staunton and Dolores Umbridge. I totally understand the mash-up. And she is magnificent. The best Mama Rose I've seen. She has huge singing chops and dominates the stage. And her Sense and Sensibility portrayal of Mrs. Jennings' daughter is brilliant. Love her.
takirks said
"Make no mistake about it: We are, as a nation, being conditioned for something."
This is becoming my feeling also and the operative word is "conditioned." Going back to eugenics, the social theory I understand best, I remind myself that the eugenicists always try to use the social theory prevailing among those in power but the eugenicists seek to change that environmental theories into genetic theories. In this sense, the eugenicists are a "canary in the mine." For example, the recent President of the American eugenics society was an expert on the 1918 flu epidemic and its social and genetic consequences. A few years later, we had a pandemic which ...
Overall, at this time our canary, the eugenics society is very concerned with behavior genetics which leads me to infer that the non-eugenicists among Our Betters are working on some kind of behavioral social theory which depends on environmental behavioral conditioning. This would accord with an attempt to line up American social practices, one by one in a random seeming way, with Chinese social credit theory and practice.
And possibly the blacks are in the cross-hairs at this time though we'll all go together if we go.
I mean this. I have been asking myself why non-policing and non-schooling is being allowed in the black community. Yes, they vote for it. Yes, James Clyburn is supporting Biden and Biden is supporting non-policing and non-schooling. Yes, it's right to point it out. But am I, with others, being used? Was someone supposed to point the behavior of the black community while the NYT ignored it? Is a message of some sort about behavior in various communities being instilled? What exactly are the procedures of "restorative justice" which it is proposed to install in the black community in place of justice? Is behavioral conditioning, monitoring and drugging what is meant by "restorative justice?" What is meant by "wraparound" as a replacement for jail? Is "wraparound" also behavioral conditioning? And what if someone isn't conditioned after some restorative justice and some wraparound? On to the straitjacket and or, like a Uighur, off to a restorative justice re-education camp? Nurse Ratchet time? Arbeit Mach Frei?
"Hey people, what's that sound?"
I don't see how those playing by "Rowling's rules" are ever going to beat those playing by Alinsky's rules. But then the fate of all liberals and moderates in revolutionary times is either move hard left, go silent, or be destroyed.
Not to politicize everything, but when reading OotP aloud to my then six year-old son, I was struck by what a strong libertarian message it espoused. And yes, Umbridge was clearly the personification of the incompetent Democrat nanny-state that was gaining in strength every day.
I take Umbridge at that headline.
Dean Tirien Steinbach does resemble Dolores Umbridge, doesn’t she?
What makes Rowling think her opposition will ever see themselves as anyone but Hermione? She wrote an obnoxious, overbearing twit and made her a hero.
You're not wrong... but at least she didn't make Hermione THE hero. Often she was straight-up annoying, all the way through the books, and while valuable for her intelligence, had to answer for her persnicketiness (autocorrect doesn't acknowledge that word but it's a standard construction so I'm going with it) and reflexive rule-following.
For that matter, even Harry wasn't THE hero. And he had to die in order to win, not knowing that there would be a way back.
Snape was probably THE hero, though his motives were small and selfish. Dumbledore was Eisenhower, or some other general who (needfully and correctly) sent his young and innocent troops off to their doom because the cause was more important than their lives, but it didn't cost him much, so I don't count him as much of a hero.
And Neville was right up there with the gang, even though he never got to be especially good at anything or attract the honies or be called the Chosen One.
Uh... spoiler alert...
The problem with making a Rowling's Rule in which your discomfort means you're the good guy is that your discomfort - the kind she's talking about - depends on your audience. In conservative circles she wouldn't have been made to feel uncomfortable for taking this view of transgenderism. (She might have been made to feel uncomfortable by her stances on other matters, which also doesn't mean she'd be right about those.)
And sometimes taking the unpopular stance really is a sign that you're the bad guy.
But actually she didn't put it that way, did she? She put it in terms of her opposers: that they are filled with self-righteous glee at the prospect of taking her down. So yeah, I guess I'd agree that self-righteous glee is a red flag.
Paddy O cites to Jeremiah and the burden of the prophets. Here is a prophet in the Book of Mormon, speaking to his society who were getting off track around 550 BC. He doesn’t want to have to deliver the message - it brings him no joy at all - it he is called and required, so he steps up despite his reticence.
“5. But behold, hearken ye unto me, and know that by the help of the all-powerful Creator of heaven and earth I can tell you concerning your thoughts, how that ye are beginning to labor in sin, which sin appeareth very abominable unto me, yea, and abominable unto God.
6 Yea, it grieveth my soul and causeth me to shrink with shame before the presence of my Maker, that I must testify unto you concerning the wickedness of your hearts.
7 And also it grieveth me that I must use so much boldness of speech concerning you, before your wives and your children, many of whose feelings are exceedingly tender and chaste and delicate before God, which thing is pleasing unto God;
8 And it supposeth me that they have come up hither to hear the pleasing word of God, yea, the word which healeth the wounded soul.
9 Wherefore, it burdeneth my soul that I should be constrained, because of the strict commandment which I have received from God, to admonish you according to your crimes, to enlarge the wounds of those who are already wounded, instead of consoling and healing their wounds; and those who have not been wounded, instead of feasting upon the pleasing word of God have daggers placed to pierce their souls and wound their delicate minds.
10 But, notwithstanding the greatness of the task, I must do according to the strict commands of God, and tell you concerning your wickedness and abominations, in the presence of the pure in heart, and the broken heart, and under the glance of the piercing eye of the Almighty God.
11 Wherefore, I must tell you the truth according to the plainness of the word of God. For behold, as I inquired of the Lord, thus came the word unto me, saying: Jacob, get thou up into the temple on the morrow, and declare the word which I shall give thee unto this people.
12 And now behold, my brethren, this is the word which I declare unto you, that many of you have begun to search for gold, and for silver, and for all manner of precious ores, in the which this land, which is a land of promise unto you and to your seed, doth abound most plentifully.
13 And the hand of providence hath smiled upon you most pleasingly, that you have obtained many riches; and because some of you have obtained more abundantly than that of your brethren ye are lifted up in the pride of your hearts, and wear stiff necks and high heads because of the costliness of your apparel, and persecute your brethren because ye suppose that ye are better than they.
14 And now, my brethren, do ye suppose that God justifieth you in this thing? Behold, I say unto you, Nay. But he condemneth you, and if ye persist in these things his judgments must speedily come unto you.”
It’s better to give than to receive said the man from Nazareth. And he is right. And giving includes risking your life in fights for others. So enjoying fighting to save children from an insane Trans fighter executing beautiful children so she will feel seen when playing stupid gender games fails her would be a far better thing. Maybe even make a man happy, like the Nashville police MEN who charged the school to give their lives for others.
Whether intentional or not, Delores Umbridge is the literary embodiment of Randi Weingarten.
It is true that you should always stop and question yourself about a tactic, whether you are enjoying it or not. But just because you derive enjoyment from it doesn't make it wrong.
The best advocates for any goal or position are the "Happy Warriors." I think of Reagan, Thatcher, Rush Limbaugh, Buckley on the right; Trump in the center (think about that); I am sure there are many on the left side of things as well (Alinsky, I suppose, is certainly one). Whether their "happiness" is the product of actual pleasure from the tactic or simply the satisfaction of belief in the righteousness of their cause is a good question, but they are and were certainly effective.
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