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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32402 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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TERF WARS

Hogwarts legacy, a high budget Harry Potter video game releases in a few weeks, and discussion around it has quickly evolved into another highly charged political issue for many within the gaming sphere.

As background, Harry Potter was created by J.K. Rowling, who in the last number of years has gotten a vitriolic amount of criticism by hard coded members of the blue tribe. Rowling is what is referred to in leftist spheres as a “TERF,” a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In other words, she is a traditional third wave feminist, but does not acknowledge trans women as being equally legitimate as biological females. Criticism of Rowling began in 2020 when she exposed criticism of certain linguistic tendencies that she had progressively seen engross within her social circles. An article was posted on Devex with the headline…

Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate

Rowling took to twitter to attempt to point out some of the inconsistencies in reasoning that she believed these social beliefs couldn’t reconcile with established feminist/progressive worldviews. She began by explaining that ‘people who menstruate,’ used to simply just be called women. And after receiving a bit of criticism herself she extrapolated on the details of her argument.

“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hated to speak the truth,”

“The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women—i.e., to male violence—‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences—is a nonsense.”

After the obvious storm of vile that came as a response to this, she then went further in extrapolating her views in an entire blogpost that went into fairly meticulous detail around the entire trans issue as well as major problems that she sees may come as a result of it. I highly encourage you to read it, if not for the argumentative qualities than simply because of the sheer balls of the entire debacle, It wouldn’t be out of place if it was placed on this very culture thread.

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/

Instead of being silenced or somehow intimidated by threats from these cultural forces, she points out that this is primarily one of the motivators of her immediate dislike of the community in general, including their constant use of hyperbole and slurs. The bitter criticism she received did not in any way overwhelm her, but instead made her far more resolute and ingrained to her worldview. She had become more fervently anti-trans since then, to points which are often hilarious. One may lose sight of the grievances often expressed by the left towards public figures, simply due to the sheer amount of it that is consistently thrown into public discourse. But it is important to point out that J.K. Rowling is a legitimate opponent of transgender ideology. Her most recent books have delved into themes that are consistently similar to the themes she has espoused. One book is literally about a detective trying to solve the case of a male serial killer who dresses up as a women in order to fool and kill biological women. Rowling gives extremely large donations to many charities who are their ideological enemies, as well as essentially banning transgender people from using any of her own charities that help victims of female abuse.

Before delving into the responses to this and the subsequent reactions, it is important to give context to what J.K. Rowling encapsulated during the prime years of her Harry Potter authorship. While harry potter is just popular in general, Blue Tribers LOVE Harry Potter, and at one time they >LOVED J.K. Rowling. Rowling’s influence in the early to mid naughts and 2010s cannot be overstated. In fact in many circumstances and social circles people began to read her novels because of her political affiliations, to support those who seemed to have blue coded interests in mind. Harry Potter had become synonymous with feminism and leftism in general, and as a result also became trumpeted by many in the early transgender movement. It isn’t simply because of her opposition to these ideas that she receives the amount of backlash that she does, but because of who she is. She at one point was one of the most influential feminists in the world and was a huge contributor to the cultural power that allowed it to influence so much of society, even in places like academia.

The responses to this given that context is frankly hilarious. It has been quite a long time since the progressive cultural zeitgeist has had such institutional opponent, particularly one that had for so long been such an icon of their movement. It is like if Luke Skywalker had joined the empire at the end of ESB.

This debate is continually devolving as it nears its release, and discussion about the game has been banned on multiple websites for its divisiveness.

https://www.ign.com/articles/hogwarts-legacy-discussion-banned-from-resetera-forum-site-over-jk-rowling-controversy

It had led to an incredible amount of confusion towards that side of political isle, as regular attacks they are so used to employing, that are usually widely successful, seemingly have no effect on Rowling in the slightest. All they can resort to leading up to the release has been reputation destruction and hostility to those who plan on buying it. The most popular tactic used is guilt by association, who claim that if one buys Hogwarts Legacy, they are therefore inherently transphobic. Another important distinction you may notice is the difficulty many are having with disassociating themselves from what was probably their favorite intellectual property. There seems to be a desire to remove Rowling, but still somehow retain possession of the franchise itself, something that is frankly impossible. Take this for example, where fans removed Rowling’s name from her books before reselling them.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/13/reseller-removes-j-k-rowlings-name-from-harry-potter-books/]

Of course, everyone knows this is impossible. Rowling was wise enough to retain full possession of her intellectual work, and anything, and I mean anything relating to Harry Potter must be directly approved by her and she receives a good sum of the profits as well. Amusement parks, toys, video games, streaming sales, everything. Rowling is Harry Potter. Many now are used to franchises they once enjoyed being influenced in one way or another by these cultural elements in their favor, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the rings, etc. It is highly ironic that a property is receiving so much backlash not for expressing any pro-red views, but simply because the creator does not agree with one of the fundamental viewpoints that have become synonymous with the left.

On the right, this has had an equally hilarious reaction. While certainly not as fervent or significant of a response, many have taken to supporting Rowling and expressing a desire to purchase Hogwarts Legacy as a form of protest. This includes everyone from Neo-cons to White nationalists.

It seems as if hardcoded Blue Tribe members are learning certain facts about modern cultural society that red tribe members have slowly learned throughout the decade or so. Cancel culture does not work on legitimate financial elites. It does not matter to what ends you try to smear Rowling with, she is and will always remain extravagantly wealthy and beyond any real financial or cultural danger. It is my guess that Hogwarts Legacy will sell extraordinarily well, for it looks to be a genuinely good video game, to the point where even those who are not familiar with Harry Potter may be attracted simply due to its quality. It is already the most pre-ordered game on Steam at the moment has no sign of slowing down. I suppose now that I am not making any particular argument in any way, but It is interesting to see a political force that is usually so successful seemingly work overtime for years on one particular target and see nothing but a proverbial scream into the wind.

It has been quite a long time since the progressive cultural zeitgeist has had such institutional opponent, particularly one that had for so long been such an icon of their movement.

Well, Margaret Atwood, but that wasn't nearly as big a deal.

Take this for example, where fans removed Rowling’s name from her books before reselling them.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/13/reseller-removes-j-k-rowlings-name-from-harry-potter-books/]

A hillarious twitter response (the person that changes the cover is trans) was along the lines of - "I hope the irony of changing the book cover and leave everything inside the same is not lost on them."

In the attempt to tar her with any brush going, they're also riding hard on the "the Goblins are an anti-Semitic trope" (as well as "the house elves are slavery and she is pro-slavery because Ron and Harry laugh at Hermione trying to get rights for the house elves" and I can't remember half the stupid stuff they come up with).

Did none of these loolahs ever hear of the Gnomes of Zurich? Apparently not.

"the Goblins are an anti-Semitic trope"

There really might be something off about the Goblins. Watching the movies now it's impossible not to see in the movies. My inclination is to say that it was chance. Something totally unintentional that looks obvious once it's been framed as an antisemitic trope. But by God it looks like an Antisemitic trope. It's literally a race of hook nosed bankers that hoard piles of gold and treasure, they even look and dress like antisemitic caricatures. Their uniform is literally black suits and white shirts. I mean, my first inclination is to say that its a coincidence but at the same time, that is a pretty freaking big coincidence.

Not everyone who sees a problem with the Goblins is acting on bad faith. It's not an ipso facto excuse to justify the actual reasons that you don't like her. The depiction of the goblins in the series really is strange.

it looks to be a genuinely good video game,

The whole rest of the content of your post aside, can I ask what you're basing this on? I haven't seen any information one way or another regarding its quality. Both the prospects of the actual gameplay being either very good or very bad would be very funny/entertaining.

From the trailers I've seen they've applied most of the good AAA features like good controls and well considered progression systems. The ip has always been a good fit for games and even the low budget ones were generally well received. They'd need to really fuck it up for it not to be a hit.

That means nothing. Look at Cyberpunk 2077. You have no reason to believe that it's a good game until it's actually released.

I mean Quidditch World Cup has better reviews than Philosophers Stone on metacritic and that game is severely hampered by a bad but IP mandated ruleset and meaningful lack of content compared to the book/movie story games.

severely hampered by a bad but IP mandated ruleset and meaningful lack of content compared to the book/movie story games

How so?

The rules are straightforwardly bad from a game design perspective. 3v3+keeper gameplay works all right, the passing combo meter is a nice touch but small number of players with limited angles and the controls are not necessarily the best. The beater minigame does as well as it can but it's just controlling/dodging a circle (and strategic play of using it to force the quaffle holder into your own chasers is kind of pointless since they're AI controlled and won't tackle very well). The other special abilities (automatic turnover, team special to score automatic points, chaser boost) are fine but have very little reason not to use at first opportunity. The biggest design problem is the snitch. The point value plus ending the match makes it generally more important than anything else. They did their best with progress on the catch meter being influenced by play on the pitch so upsets are not that common. The race minigame is fine. Overall it's like a gimmicky NBA jam game but everyone has the same gimmicks.

Content wise it kind of falls off. Win 3 matches with any of the school teams to unlock world cup mode and all but one of the world cup teams. Grind away through an 18 round tournament (skipping two rounds) to win the cup to unlock a special exhibition only stage (that plays like every other stage). The teams do play differently but only minorly (appropriate for a sports game) and have different cinematics but the gameplay blends together a lot. The most interesting variation is how snitch meter gain from team special is balanced by whether it scores 1 or 2 goals. Matches run pretty long so winning a cup with any one team is something of a grind and the unlockables are one more team, a special location and collectibles. Collectible grinding is mostly rerunning and winning a cup with each team plus some special condition ones. Aside from achievements, meaningful unlocks are completed pretty quickly. In game moments of greatness are slim as is expression space so not much memorable about matches themselves. Outside of core gameplay doesn't carry it very far either. The cinematics/voice clips (x team player did thing) layered on top per stage visuals is thoughtful but becomes noticeably repeated. The announcer victory quote is the same every single match. There's not the type of story or characterization you'd see even in something like an older character racing game or fighting game.

It's a neat game but there's a reason it was more commonly found in the bargain bin than on a shelf. I feel like more team variation, some way to speed up play and characterization beyond names and different 3D models of the players could have made it better. Actual sports games like FIFA have more player choices in terms of passing and how the players are arrayed on the pitch affecting play up and down the field. They can be further carried by fans of the real life sport with an interest in the real stats and facsimile players from the real teams which doesn't really apply to Quidditch World Cup.

The book/movie story games have entire books worth plot events to use and can use many different kinds of challenges to control pacing, make the games interesting. Quidditch is just quidditch and doesn't have much to carry it besides the idea of the game.

I mean obviously i can't decisively say its going to be a great game before its even released, but from the extensive gameplay trailers that have been released I can say that it's the most expensive Harry Potter game that has ever been made for sure. Regardless of the virtue of its gameplay it seems to encapsulate what so many people love about the universe, and that in of itself is enough reason it will probably sell like wild. It's almost like Star Wars, where regardless of the quality of the content, most people feel a draw towards simply existing in the world that it encompasses.

There's a lot of really expensive crap getting released, even and maybe especially specific to licensed works, while gameplay trailers are known for being misleading.

Thanks for this post, @TheBookOfAllan, interesting topic & good analysis.

The only flaws I'm aware of have already been corrected in the excellent reply by @Amadan.

Regarding the Troubled Blood misinformation, you may be blameless, as it was spread by some allegedly journalistic outlets. If anyone's interested, the incident was covered as part of at least one free episode of the Blocked & Reported podcast. (Katie Herzog has read the book.)

And to elaborate on the Rowling charity thing, the only "ban" I'm aware of was her recently opening the only female-only crisis shelter in a city that already had at least one mixed-sex crisis shelter. (Mixed-sex in the sense that it claims to be women-only but uses a John Money / Judith Butler type definition of "women".)

What do you mean by “dropped them?”

None of that is what I’d call disqualifying. Not for kids getting invested, not for parents buying the merch. Not for teenagers remembering them fondly years down the line.

I don’t think, today, we could get the same explosion of fan culture that we did for HP and Twilight, but I’d put that more on the different Internet than on any tribalism.

Commenting on how the Harry Potter world is problematic and proposing fan fiction/head-canons to fix it is a whole genre of Tumblr post that dates back years. If anything, paying attention to the problematic aspects of Harry Potter has become less popular, only because paying any attention at all to Harry Potter has become less popular with the whole "Rowling is a TERF" thing.

It's not a book with that supports the "trust the experts" style of government that's been a staple of leftism for a long time but has ramped up even more since 2016.

This is a strange complaint. YA/children's literature as a genre practically requires authority figures be useless or oblivious (or the problems be so small in scale they're appropriate for adults to ignore) because otherwise the adults would be the protagonists and it wouldn't be a YA/children's story. Harry Potter isn't exactly dystopian fiction, but it sorta fits into the genre of children/teenagers having to do the right thing against an oppressive/corrupt government.

Note that the epilogue of Harry Potter involves the government becoming good and competent once the main characters have fixed the government and Harry (at least, I forget who else) has become part of it.

It's true that they're anti-racism to a degree, which was part of the appeal, but there are other aspects that would be very troubling to the left today. For example, government officials are mostly incompetent, petty tyrants. The wizard newspaper prints only fluff pieces and official propaganda. It's not a book with that supports the "trust the experts" style of government that's been a staple of leftism for a long time but has ramped up even more since 2016.

Nah, they went a decade+ without noticing it's a story about armed children in school fighting the government, or that the Slytherins are a better "Jewish conspiracy" stand-in than the goblins. Shallow thinking is endemic, and motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.

The armed children fighting the government is a tasty interpretation I didn't notice. But slytherine as Jewish cabal seems quite a stretch for what is a very basic elitist/racist portrayal.

The Slytherins are an unmanly ethnogroup that uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government. The "good ones" are a favor-trading backdealer whose redeeming value is that he's so fame and favor hungry that he is willing to dip into genuine meritocracy instead of raw nepotism, and a creepy villain who is "redeemed" by his pathetic unrequited lust for a pure Aryan Gryffindor redhead.

I mean, yeah, it's a silly stretch, but it's funny how far you can stretch it to fit.

The Slytherins are an unmanly ethnogroup that uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government.

Do you mean Slytherins or pure bloods? Slytherins obviously aren't an ethnogroup, and to the extent that purebloods are an ethnogroup the analogy doesn't hold up.

The sacred 28 is a list of the 28 truely pure blooded British families. Those 28 families include

  • The Weasleys.

  • The Prwetts of which all the boys died fighting Voldemort, and Molly Weasley is the only daughter.

  • The Longbottom's

  • The Shacklebolts

The list includes other non-heroic but not Voldemort adjacent families, like Olivander, other plotting backroom dealers like Slughorn and maybe Greengrass.

So even this take doesn't break things down into a unified ethno group. A large amout of the fighting is among the sacred 28.

A Crouch, a Lestrange, and a Lestrange/Black torture the Longbottoms into insanity.

A Longbottom destroys a Horcrux.

Voldemort's side (1/2 Gaunt) killes the Prewetts boys.

Molly Weasley/Prwettt kills Belatrixx Lestrange/Black.

Voldemort Kidnaps an Olivander.

Belatrixx Lestrange/Black kills another Black.

A black betrays Voldemort and steals his Horcrux.

A Shackbolt is one of the cheif enemies of Voldemort.

A Crouch is Voldemort's main government opposition during the war, but his son worked for Voldemort, and his son later kills him.

All of these surnames are in the sacred 28.

So it's no so much an unmanly ethnogroup that uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government. So much as it is a part of of ethnogroup hat uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government, often against other members of that exact ethnogroup.... actually, on reflection the the intrasect fighting might make it a more accurate representation of modern Jewry, but not in a way that lines with classic sterotypes (that and how secular liberal Jews and Orthedox Jews are diametrically opposed on every political issue is not well known in common discourse).

I guess all of this just sound like maximally generic effete elite stereotype applied to a specific group. It's essentially a Marxist critique. It's practically a yungian archetype, that you can apply it to a group whose reputation is patterned matched to this archetype is jut not that interesting.

It’s not really even Marxist, it’s a small-r republican critique of degenerate aristocrats.

This reminds me of classical vampires - similarly a (literal) degenerate aristocracy - being interpreted as an antisemitic trope.

"Effete elite" is part of what Slytherin has going on, but there's stuff like the Slytherin dormitory being in a dungeon, I've seen that called out as based in an antisemitic trope around ghettoes.

Ghettoes are just the part of a city where a secluded minority lives. Jews living in ghettos is a historical fact, making it an antisemitic trope is already a stretch.

But all the houses have their own secluded dormitories - this isn't Slytherin-specific, it's Hogwarts-generic, so the ghetto comparison has no leg to stand on. "Dungeon" is just generic evil.

Adult Slytherins, at least the wealthy leaders*, live in manors. Unless "rich and evil" immediately makes you think "Jews" - in which case I suspect you are the antisemite - they should code to snooty aristocrats.

*Also an important distinction. The Malfoys are rich, but that's about it - the rank-and-file Slytherins/Death Dealers tend to be thugs.

Corrupted pattern-matching finding antisemitism where there isn't any is a rather big problem, but this is one of the more egregious examples.

The antisemitic angle is that, like, one asks "why are the rich evil guys living in squalor?", and while the surface answer is "that's a generic evil trope", the underlying origin of the trope that would have a scheming, wealthy villain who lives in squalor is negative stereotypes about Jews.

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I don't know, this all requires someone who seems otherwise quite progressive having a whole lot of knowledge of Jewish stereotypes that I've never heard of before.

In the context I saw it discussed, it was more "this generic evil trope is based on anti-semitism so the series is unconsciously anti-semitic"; this being before Rowling's cancellation the assumption wasn't going to be evil intent.

There is also the whole element of the legal slavery of a race of sapient beings capable of thought, speech, etc. that is nearly unexamined at least as an institution by even the good characters of the universe. That part is so weird/'problematic' to almost be funny.

I really don't want to defend Rowling's writing or plotting, which ranges from the sodden to the incoherent, but I don't think this is particularly complete criticism: Granger, at least literally starts a (muddled-thinking) organization specifically opposed to House Elf slavery. It's kinda a significant plot line in book four!

Without meaning to move the goal posts, a single one of the main trio of characters (and the perhaps overly socially-conscious/goody-goody one at that) caring about slavery, therefore clarifying that at least in universe its something that the characters could conceivably care about, but for the most part, just don't, is almost funnier.

Yeah, that's a more reasonable description. Granger's pretty explicitly well-intentioned by not especially well-considered (eg, an early SPEW action involves putting out hats, which terrifies elves that don't want to be free and wouldn't work), while Potter only cares to the extent that Dobby is especially poorly-treated, and Weasly doesn't think about it at all, and these are just treated as facts of the setting rather than saying anything serious about the character's morality. There's Watsonian reasons for that, especially given Potter's home life looks worse than that of Hogwarts house elves, but from a Doylist perspective it does come across really incoherently.

I never knew exactly how we were supposed to read that part. I always felt like we were supposed to be rolling our eyes at Hermione and that her attempts at elf liberation were a satire of overly zealous leftism but then other times it felt like we were supposed to be on her side, granted I haven't engaged with the material since I was like 17. What do other people think?

My recollection is that Hermione's liberation front was viewed as a misguided (we see that not all elfs would adjust as well as Dobby), but the slavery system is not obviously good either.

I think that particular plot element was one the many elements of satire or should I say cynicism in the series. Remember the first chapter of the first book, almost as if penned by Roald Dahl? The world of Harry Potter is not nice: it it is unkind, uncaring, in general, quite drabby in the British kind of way. Not just Muggles, but it is often the overall undertone and outlook of Wizarding World, too, while it has more bright spots. (At least for Harry. But consider Snape.)

I personally felt like Hermione's crusade on behalf of house elves was meant to be eye-rolling. Well intentioned, but still cringy and ill advised. She gets told constantly it's a bad idea, offends the very people she's trying to "save", etc. Heck even the name of her movement (S.P.E.W.) is a joke on her overzealousness and obliviousness.

I thought it was an obvious satire of overly zealous leftism, as befits the centrist liberal Rowling - exactly the type whose general feeling towards activism might be seen as bemused "silly kids, they'll grow over it", at least until she became a major target for activists herself.

They're a race of fictional creatures that help with chores. I think people are trying way too hard about this.

Whenever I see someone on reddit go on this big rant about how awful it is that the characters in Harry Potter aren't constantly denouncing house elves I just roll my eyes. Boy, could you imagine how embarrassing it would be if we exploited animals in real life?

Animals can't talk and most aren't regarded as sapient. On the other hand, house elves basically have a human equivalent mind in a small body, and are also non-consensual and generally unhappy servants of humans. As another commenter pointed out, this injustice actually is addressed in the books (though practically in passing) when a socially conscious/activist main character starts an organization opposed to house elf slavery, clarifying that it is conceivable to view it as i.e. worse than eating meat in-universe. Just that most characters don't care. This is silly to get into but again I regard it more as odd/funny than anything.

also non-consensual and generally unhappy servants of humans

That's just Dobby. Normal house elfs are neither unhappy nor wish to leave.

It's been a while since I read the Harry Potter books, but IIRC there's not much sign that other house elves besides Dobby don't want to be slaves. The problem is we hear so little from them that we're more-or-less just told that Dobby is an exception to the general rule that house elves are natural slaves.

Everyone remembers Dobby but the later books actually delve into the whole enforced but not necessarily unwanted servant relationship pretty well with Kreacher. An old, bitter, devoted to the concept of servanthood who hates his current (at character introduction) master and pines for his previous ones. Betrays the main cast but cannot be set free because of his knowledge of secrets and in a YA book for modern sensibilities, killing him is foreclosed as an option. Takes a liking to his new master who is initially very uncomfortable with the relationship but settles into a sense of normalcy. Has a heroic moment in the climactic battle but the literal last mention in the books is the protagonist wondering if the elf will bring his master a sandwich.

Not only isn't there much sign house elves want freedom, we are shown the opposite. When Winky gets emancipated she's a depressed wreck afterwards, drinking and crying in the corner of the kitchen. And when she is asked if she gets paid by Dumbledore, she indignantly proclaims that she might be disgraced, but isn't so low as that. When Hermione tries to convince the other house elves about her cause, they are offended and push her out of the kitchen politely but firmly.

We don't get to see how house elf society in general feels, but at least the elves at Hogwarts do not want freedom.

A wrinkle people often miss is that house elves supposedly are quite powerful themselves.

Powerful yes, but not so much as HP wizards who are in theory just shockingly OP.

I've always been drawn in to the setting partly by the idea that modern HP wizards (save a handful, like Voldemort and Dumbledore) are as silly, lazy & unoptimal in their use of magic as they are portrayed due to winning so hard against everything else that they no longer need to put in much effort.

Dobby casually overpowered Lucius Malfoy, a powerful Death Eater. And once upon a time the Elves fought a war against the wizards and lost so badly that their enslaved descendents shudder in horror at the thought of being freed.

Yes, HP wizards are quite strong but in the same way real world humans are. HP wizards can kill someone with a word but we baseline humans have, as far as combat is concerned, strictly better weaponry. It's true that in HP the castle disables technology and perhaps that's the kind of thing wizards can bring with them everywhere but wizards in HP really are only roughly as dangerous to eachother as the rest of us can trivially be if we allow the carry of our equivalent of wands. I was always disappointed in the lack of exploration of how a wizarding world would interact with the muggle world but I know think it was for the best. The HP world really just can't be resolved with living among muggles, especially not where any wizard is so poor.

You are absurdlyunderestimating how OP Harry Potter style Wizard's are. Wizard's powers are not equivalent to that of a modern human with a gun.

In an actual war between all of the muggle world and a group 10 talented wizards, the wizards would win in a single day. Apply an invisibility charm, aparate to Washington, imperio the President, do the same to all ranking cabinet members. Repeat for each country. Be back home for lunch. You already won, but you can spend the next week Aparating around under invisibility charm and casting imperio on everyone that matters.

That is a single trivial application of what you could do. It doesn't matter if a gun is better than an Avada Kadavra, a wizard should win every fight against a muggle without using any lethal force.

I'll admit that not all wizards have access to the full magical arsenal, but HP wizards have:

-transformation, including perfect impersonation

-healing, regeneration & poison removal

-long-term mind control (Imperius curse alone solos the muggle world) and truth-detection

-limited time travel and the 'I win button' of perfect good luck

-invisibility, personal flight and teleportation

-installation cloaking (Hogwarts is nuke-proof because you can't target it)

-a million situational spells, potions, items & useful creatures that any given wizard might have access to, and will quickly proliferate if they prove useful (as, say, a ward against bullets might)

Wizards do not see muggles as a threat in the same way as humans don't really see bears as a threat - a careless human can easily die to a bear attack but this essentially never happens, and if humans ever decided to eradicate bears it would be an entirely one-sided affair.

Wizards can be poor because they don't have anything other wizards want & are barred by wizarding law (with downright spooky surveillance abilities) from participating on the muggle economy. But they're never truly destitute as long as they'vegot a wand, as they can magic up the rough neccessities of life in extrema.

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Any Transfiguration master who knows where to read up on chemistry can, as HPMoR demonstrates, cause death and mayhem far more efficiently than if he had an automatic gun, or even a rocket launcher.

Never read any of his stuff, but that sounds good, actually. Copy-pasting modern morality on societies that are supposed to mimick medieval ones is one of the most annoying things about modern fiction.

societies that are supposed to mimick medieval ones

Harry Potter is set in basically the modern day (the late 90s to early 2000s, to be exact) and the main setting is meant to evoke the experience of students at a mid to late 20th century British boarding school, one perhaps a few decades 'behind the times' of the actual year during which the story takes place. I agree that more fiction that mimicks historical societies in setting should try not to transplant modern morality onto said setting, but that is not the situation of Harry Potter. The existence of slavery and the idea that a person who is basically a young millennial going through high school is so nonplussed by the widespread slavery that exists in his world actually is almost funnily bad.

Sorry, I made a wrong turn. I thought this was the Sanderson thread.

she is a traditional third wave feminist

This might be nitpicking, but I've always understood TERFs as being perceived as a second-wave holdout that survived the post-90s intersectionalization of the movement (that being the third wave).

Yes and no. It's a good rule of thumb, but there's no hard and fast distinction between third and second wave feminism. Third wave intersectional feminism is most directly a descendant of second wave black feminism (mixed with queer theory etc). The issue with describing contemporary TERFs as second wave radical feminst holdouts is that often TERFs subscribe to other parts of temporary woke/intersectional ideology (e.g. CRT). It is only specifically trans ideology they oppose.

If one has spent time browsing Ovarit.com or a similar forum, one notes there's a fair few of TERFs/"TERFs" that have come to doubt some other left-associated policies, like immigration from Muslim countries. See e.g. this thread. I've also seen threads where the forum participants discuss whether it's ok to vote for Republicans (and list further points of personal agreement) or whether the GOP is still a bridge too far due to views on abortion, LGB-not-the-T issues, religion etc.

Of course, TERFs of all varieties will oppose as a matter of course pornograpy, prostitution, surrogacy and various other similar things that latter waves of feminism are more positive towards, at least in certain contexts.

Indeed, there was even an attempt from the TERF Julie Bindel to stop the TERF Meghan Murphy from getting too buddy-buddy with the right.

That’s definitely the imposed perception, especially given the “R”, in TERF, but I think it’s a strategic move to paint any non-conservative trans-skeptic woman as merely sex negative, extreme, or reacting to trauma from cis-males.

merely sex negative, extreme, or reacting to trauma from cis-males.

Although, to be fair, don't those apply pretty well to Rowling? In the essay in which she clarified her position, it was clear that most of her "transmisogyny" was really "misandry" applied with a wider brush.

I've certainly compared her views with sex-negative second wave feminists in the past.

There seems to be a desire to remove Rowling, but still somehow retain possession of the franchise itself, something that is frankly impossible.

This general situation is actually why I'm very consciously a fan of knock-offs. I'm a huge believer in libre/open culture, and I think modern copyright laws are a travesty across the board.

Give me the Evil Galactic Authority, where the noble but persecuted Star Paladins use laser-swords to fight off the evil Inquisitors. Give me a villain in a YA novel with an arc suspiciously similar to Zuko from AtLA. Give me Invincible's Omni-man and knock-off Justice League. Give me copy cats and follow the leaders, and fan fiction.

I hate that Disney and a few other companies own so much of our culture, and take a century to give us the scraps off their table. Human creativity is usually more like that of Shakespeare, who mostly retold well-known stories, or Sir Thomas Mallory, who codified an existing story tradition. Our cultures emphasis on pointless originality and innovation in storytelling is a disease, just as surely as the fact that only a small number of franchises dominate the box office is.

I don't really care much about the object-level question of Rowling's Wizarding World. But if people can find the non-copyrightable part of her work, and can retain the soul of Harry Potter in the derivative works, I wish them luck. More cultural elements should be like Romero zombies or Slender Man - not really belonging to anyone, and being used and reused to tell interesting stories, or just retelling old common places with a new twist.

Seriously! I strongly suspect that copyright law significantly hinders our culture. If ownership expired after, say, 10 years rather than our current (100?), not only would we have many great retellings, but also I don't think that the original properties would be nearly as powerful.

Like, if anyone can write about the Empire, lightsabers, etc., then maybe the cultural fad burns itself out more quickly, and its best components are more quickly turned into tropes commonly used in many different stories.

I also think copyright law hinders Western culture, but for different reasons. I don't think copyright law crushes creativity that much, or hinders creative output. It's pretty simple to make minor changes to an existing story and be protected, for example. Despite the odious nature of some recent lawsuits over hit songs, any person creative enough to make meaningful works is probably able to get around existing laws easily. Instead, I think what is essentially permanent ownership of creative works has warped how society looks at and interacts with culture more broadly. Specifically, the existence of copyrights that outlast human lifespans causes people to view other pieces of culture that can't be copyrighted through a similar lens.

The common complaints of 'appropriation' and the massive support such concepts have gained from most of the American Left are a symptom of this changing viewpoint. The person who claims that cooking Chinese food when you aren't Chinese is a hostile act against the Chinese is applying the logic of copyrights more expansively. It's quite insidious because the same people that make these claims are often some of the individuals most likely to describe themselves as anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, and against the commodification of culture. They simultaneously protest against American culture while openly reinforcing one of its norms unwittingly.

As someone who is broadly opposed to long-term copyrights(I'd prefer copyrights that expire after a decade!) on the basis they are non-productive economic rents, the trend is alarming. Of the people predisposed to oppose the current state of things on this topic, a significant portion are serving the interest of institutional copyright holders. While woke politics are losing steam, the idea of cultural appropriation has long set in throughout the current American leftward coalition. Outside of the black sheep in the stupidpol set, is there any part of the left where the concept of cultural appropriation hasn't simply become an accepted truth?

While a legal expansion of copyright into more nebulous territory is unlikely, if the cultural norms render it untenable to engage with and more importantly synthesize elements of other cultures, as is increasingly becoming the case, that would be a huge loss indeed. I can see that happening, as a large chunk of the conservative coalition simply won't care about this at all, so there will be little stopping this from metastasizing into something oppressive.

100 year copyright

This seems to me like we're far past the point of copyright-life-extension singularity. Examining past trends, it seems like almost a certainty that before the next 100 years is up copyright will have been extended by at least another 100 if not a factor of 10. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that to some extent copyright is based on years since the death of the creator, and surely human lifespan will soon start benefiting as we approach a medical singularity (especially considering rich and successful creators will have access to many of these benefits earlier than the average person) Thus excepting for the prospect that copyright law reform might one day place, (unlikely) most works currently under copyright will probably never enter public domain (unless all possible inheritors of the copyright are somehow killed/destroyed).

For whatever reason, as of 2019, works are actually falling out of copyright in the United States. Maybe Disney is less powerful somehow? Or maybe copyright is long enough for them and they don't see the point anymore? Or maybe they missed the 20 year calendar reminder they set in 1998 and forgot and will get right on extending copyright soon.

SOPA/PIPA changed the entire power dynamic. Big Content doesn't have the sway in Washington that it used to.

Interesting. I hope the trend continues.

I once had a post written about JK Rowling and her most recent book, The Ink Black Heart, and then decided it was too nerdy and never posted it. Thanks for this - coincidentally, I had another effortpost written and almost ready to go, and then thought it was maybe Too Online and nerdy to post here. But since you led the way, I will post it shortly.

Now - I have been following the Rowling/TERF wars for a while now, and I have to take issue with a number of points in your narrative.

Disclaimer: I am kind of a fan of Rowling. Both for her books (yes, I came late and old to Potter fandom and still liked them - sue me - but I also like her Cormoran Strike novels and I even think The Casual Vacancy was pretty good), and for her principled stance and willingness to take the immense amount of shit she's taken without backing down or turning nasty and bitter.

Now, just for starters, I realize this is a semantic battle that's lost, but I will nonetheless keep pointing it out: "TERF" at least originally meant Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Radical feminism is a specific school of feminist ideology, it doesn't just mean "feminists who are really zealous and strident." It's actually quite fringe in modern feminism. Rowling is a feminist, and could probably be described as a Second Wave feminist, but she is certainly not a radical feminist.

I would also dispute the "Trans-Exclusionary" label, but that's somewhat more subjective, depending on what you mean by "exclude."

Criticism of Rowling began in 2020 when she exposed criticism of certain linguistic tendencies that she had progressively seen engross within her social circles. An article was posted on Devex with the headline…

Actually, it began earlier than that. At one point she "liked" a Tweet by an actual TERF, got called out on it, and sort of walked it back, but there had been hints earlier. 2020 was when she basically went "mask off."

She had become more fervently anti-trans since then, to points which are often hilarious.

I have been following Rowling on Twitter since before she got Voldemorted, and I actually do not think she is "anti-trans" except in the sense that no, she does not believe that TWAW. Of course this is enough to make her a transphobic bigot who is Literally Killing People, according to trans activists, but her actual position, every time she talks about it, is basically standard old school liberalism. She does not hate trans people or want them back in the closet or legally denied the right to live as women, and I think "anti-trans" is frankly a lie that trans activists keep pushing despite her actual words on the subject.

Has she become increasingly more willing to snap back at people who are taking shots at her? Yes. I have yet to see her actually say anything that could be called "bigoted" in good faith.

But it is important to point out that J.K. Rowling is a legitimate opponent of transgender ideology.

This is true, but again, I think some clarification is called for. "Opponent of transgender ideology," especially here, can sometimes be read as "Thinks trans people are gross and mentally ill," or even suggests that she's some sort of tradcon. She is definitely not. She's an opponent of the excesses of the modern trans movement, and putting trans women in women's shelters and prisons, etc. She is not an opponent of trans people having civil rights, being free to live their lives as trans people, etc.

Her most recent books have delved into themes that are consistently similar to the themes she has espoused. One book is literally about a detective trying to solve the case of a male serial killer who dresses up as a women in order to fool and kill biological women.

Okay, that book is Troubled Blood, and I've actually read it. I'm afraid you are just repeating a lie that her critics (most of whom did not read the book) made up. There is a single scene in that book where the serial killer dresses as a woman to avoid detection and escape. He is otherwise a plain old straight dude who likes killing women, but it is never implied that he's trans, or even gay, and dressing as a woman is not a recurring MO of is.

Rowling gives extremely large donations to many charities who are their ideological enemies, as well as essentially banning transgender people from using any of her own charities that help victims of female abuse.

She funded a women's shelter specifically for biological women. So far as I know, she has not otherwise "banned transgender people from using any of her own charities that help victims of female abuse," and I doubt she even has the power to do so.

Now, I'm off to finish my somewhat related post about another famous fantasy author and fandom.

This post is on point.

The Nuanced Steelman of Rowling's position is, to my view, this:

'Women' are a subcategory of humans, having similar characteristics, which includes having a uterus, which usually means the ability to get pregnant and to menstruate, and likewise having a physiology that tends to be physically weaker and less massive than the average human, and if you will, a psychology that is less prone to violent outbursts. Note that this definition is mostly inclusive, such that having/not having a uterus won't necessarily exclude you (e.g. if a biological woman has a hysterectomy).

BECAUSE of these shared characteristics, people who fall in the subcategory of 'women' are faced with various social and physical 'threats' that 'nonwomen' do not face. That includes dealing with pregnancy and the health issues this implies, a higher vulnerability to being physically attacked, a greater likelihood of being raped (and then facing pregnancy), and more difficulty with intense physical labor. Also the whole sports thing, where they can't measure up to the performance of elite athletes. Or, sometimes, adolescent males.

BECAUSE of these specific challenges/threats, it is worth drawing drawing a circle around the group of people who cluster around the characteristics of 'women' and treating them as a 'special class' who need certain sorts of accomodations and protections due to their particular vulnerabilities. This can include separate locker rooms, specific shelters for solely their use, separate sports leagues, and maybe some special rules/laws which afford them some advantages based on their sex. Abortion rights are obviously tied up in this too.

If the category of 'women' is broadened to include more and more people who DO NOT share the aforementioned characteristics and thus DO NOT face the same challenges/threats, this begins to defeat the purpose/use of having special accommodations and protections for women. If women need to be protected from physical violence due to their smaller/weaker physiology, allowing someone with a larger physiology (thanks to testosterone) into a women's shelter very directly defeats the point. If women prisoners need to be protected from rape due to the possibility of pregnancy, allowing an inmate with a functional penis into a women's prison very directly defeats the point. That situation is NOT hypothetical. If women need a separate sports league due to their overall lower athletic ability, allowing someone who has been through male adolescence (see above example with soccer for why this matters) to compete very directly defeats the point.

If the category of 'women' is defined entirely based on what gender the individual identifies as, then the entire edifice of treating 'women' as a special subcategory of humans goes out the window, AND THIS WILL HAVE A DETRIMENTAL EFFECT ON PEOPLE WITH THE AFOREMENTIONED CHARACTERISTICS as they now don't get the same accommodations or protections that were previously set up for them, and can't do anything about it.

As a third-wave feminist, J.K. Rowling correctly sees how this detrimental effect could harm 'women' (as she defines them) and thus is remaining consistent in her belief that 'women' need to be defined by physical characteristics and need to be given certain accomodations and protections by dint of those physical characteristics, and to allow the category of 'women' to be eroded is a betrayal of all the work they've done to acquire those special protections and accommodations.

If this makes her a TERF, so be it. It doesn't change the fact that people with these characteristics need someone to stand up for them.

I honestly think J.K. Rowling believes things VERY SIMILAR to the above, but obviously that can't be explained easily in a tweet, and her opponents wouldn't listen in good faith anyway, so much easier to just be snarky and stand your ground.

I also don't see good evidence she's "anti-trans" in any way other than rejecting a trans women's claim to 'womanhood' based on the above logic and thus being unafraid to hurt a trans person's feelings by not validating their identity if said identity encroaches on/erodes the category of 'woman' as defined by her.

If women prisoners need to be protected from rape due to the possibility of pregnancy, allowing an inmate with a functional penis into a women's prison very directly defeats the point. That situation is NOT hypothetical.

The linked article says:

It was initially reported by DOC officials that Minor [trans woman] had impregnated two inmates after engaging in “consensual sexual relationships” (...)

“One was absolutely consensual,” said Demeri [Minor's lawyer]. “But in the other case, Demi [Minor] was a victim of coercion.” Demeri said that the second woman, who was jealous of Bellamy, snuck into Minor’s cell and threatened her into having sex, saying “I’ll beat your bitch up.”

So the situation is in fact hypothetical.

Also, female prisoners don't "need to be protected from rape due to the possibility of pregnancy". They need to be protected from rape because rape is bad. And this applies to all prisoners, not just women.

I thank you for your clarifications and i apologize for any wrong information in my post. I will admit i am not really an avid reader of hers, and have never even read any of the Harry Potter books at all, and am simply observing what i see from the outside and attempted to get a grasp of the intricacies from the position i am perceiving them. I do keep up to date on game news and the topic is unavoidable in the communities at this point.

She is definitely not. She's an opponent of the excesses of the modern trans movement, and putting trans women in women's shelters and prisons, etc. She is not an opponent of trans people having civil rights, being free to live their lives as trans people, etc.

While i understand your point about this i still remain very skeptical. I believe Rowling holds far more politically incorrect views about trans people than what she espouses but understands that she is already edging on politically dangerous waters, although that is a strictly personal perception and i can't prove that either way. I have just noticed that most who demonstrate politically incorrect views usually hold far more hard-line opinions than they usually let on in public.

As someone who's followed her for a while, as I said, I can't claim to know her personally or have any deep insight into her inner thoughts, but if her public persona is a mask and she's going Full TERF in private, she's doing a really good job of maintaining the public front.

I have just noticed that most who demonstrate politically incorrect views usually hold far more hard-line opinions than they usually let on in public.

For instance?

I feel like the vast majority of people are going to conceal the true extent of their politically incorrect beliefs since it's socially advantageous.

I'm not saying I necessarily disagree, but a few specific examples would be appreciated. Can you name any specific individuals who expressed some mildly non-PC opinions in a public forum and were then "outed" as having expressed much more extreme opinions in private?

But that holds true for everyone. Even people who espouse politically correct views in public.

Now, just for starters, I realize this is a semantic battle that's lost, but I will nonetheless keep pointing it out: "TERF" at least originally meant Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Radical feminism is a specific school of feminist ideology, it doesn't just mean "feminists who are really zealous and strident." It's actually quite fringe in modern feminism. Rowling is a feminist, and could probably be described as a Second Wave feminist, but she is certainly not a radical feminist.

I would also dispute the "Trans-Exclusionary" label, but that's somewhat more subjective, depending on what you mean by "exclude."

I've shifted to "trans-critical feminist" for the same group. I feel like "gender critical" is confusing terminology, in that it really is transgender critical, but "critical" is more accurate these days than "exclusionary", and, as you note, a lot of these people are not radical feminists.

(I think the "TERF" terminology was originally more accurate -- the split started with radical feminists who distrusted men and therefore wanted to exclude trans women from certain kinds of feminist events. But the usage has broadened to the point where the wording needs to be improved.)

I feel like "gender critical" is confusing terminology, in that it really is transgender critical

I don't agree, though I'm confused because there are so many definitions of "gender".

The ideologies that sprung up around this word, in living memory, have various implications that I and others disagree with. Only one of these implications is proposition 1 - that it's actually possible to be a woman in a male body.

Whereas I and many others have no problem with proposition 2 - that some people with male bodies really wish they were women, and will behave in ways more typical of women where doing so causes no harm to others (in the usual classical liberal sense).

I am 100% accepting of proposition 2, so the only aspect in which I am "transgender critical" is in the gender aspect. I'm critical of those ideologies around "gender" that endorse proposition 1, and have other implications I don't like.

As I understand it, the word "transgender," in current usage, specifically means someone who considers themselves to actually be a gender that is incongruent with the one they were initially sorted into. So, you've got no problem with trans people's gender expression. The thing you have a problem with is that they are transgender.

How society treats people mostly doesn't depend on whether they're a man or a woman, because that mostly doesn't matter. Where it does matter (prisons, sports, changing rooms, healthcare, etc.), it's almost entirely an issue of sex, not any of these new conceptions of gender.

Consider proposition 3 - that it is immoral not to replace sex with some conception(s) of gender, in the above contexts.

Perhaps the biggest sense in which I'm "gender critical" is that I'm critical of proposition 3.

The thing you have a problem with is that they are transgender.

This doesn't seem correct. I have a problem with people who push proposition 3. Most of those people are cisgender. Some of the people on 'my side' are transgender. (For all I know it could be a silent majority of transgender people who are on 'my side'.)

I think there just needs to be an acknowledgement that when people talk about TERFs, they are conflating two distinct, though thus far allied, categories. Quoting myself from the old forum:

I think the thing is that there are really two categories - let's call it TERF 1 and TERF 2 - which are obviously related but still separate.

TERF 1, or actual TERFs, are classic radical feminists who fully share all the viewpoints of the ideology - there are two distinct classes of humanity, men and women, these are defined by their biological features related to reproduction, nevertheless they don't have mental differences and the subservient societal status of women and the related cultural factors are explained by the history of male oppression of women to control their reproduction etc (ie. patriarchy). They usually make zero bones about their absolute opposition to men as a class, tend to advocate female separatism from to as good a degree as possible, and their opposition to trans rights activism flows from their belief that any attempt to obfuscate the biological reality of men and women can only be another facet of patriarchy preventing women from organizing as a class. Or that's how I've understood this ideology, at any rate.

TERF 2, or TE"RF"s, do not actually fully share the previous view. Instead this is an inchoate category of people, in great majority women, who for one reason or another have come to dislike trans rights activism and have latched to the movement established by TERF 1 types since there's nothing better for them.

(The alternatives are religious conservatism which is unappealing if you're not religious, have a liberal religious perspective, have a non-mainstream religion or otherwise don't wish to share the religious conservative conclusions, the sort of far-right nationalist ideologies that just come off as reification of assholishness and are right out if you're an ethnic minority, and Quillette/IDW-style anti-trans rationalism that often just comes off as too autistic for most people and seems like too thin a gruel anyway for someone who wishes for something more solid and uncompromising.)

Even if TERF 2 types might not share the full set of ideas by TERF 1 types - they don't wish to fully separate from men but instead have relationships and even marriages with them, they might browse FemaleDatingStrategy style sites and engage in performative femininity etc. - they can often pick and mix whatever they like, typically related to anti-trans and anti-sex-work rhetoric, and combine it to an unwieldy soup with various bargain-bin liberal ideological shibboleths, the sort of conservative tendencies they might not even admit to themselves, and the sort of "the men are SO stupid" style flippant rhetoric that often passes for feminist analysis even though it's just the sort of a thing women have really talked among themselves throughout the entire history, relating to the fact that men are, indeed, often stupid.

What might also attract TERF 2 types to TERF 1 ideologies is that TERF 1 ideology represents what might be called "ossified progressivism" - it's a veritable historical time capsule of a point of view that was cutting-edge in the 70s, but which the onmarch of progress, so to say, has then bypassed. One can see it easily when browsing TERF forums, there's a constant befuddlement about how feminist movement achieved many of its goals in the 70s but now the new crop of progressives is, from their point of view, throwing them away.

This sort of ossified progressivism might not be big-c Conservative, but since it, indeed, conserves a certain sort of an intellectual output of a previous era, it can appeal to people who feel a (usually unconscious) conservative impulse within themselves, but cannot identify with any actual ongoing conservative movements, for reasons listed above.

TERF 2 types are, for obvious reasons, more populous than TERF 1 types, but since they don't really yet form an organized tendency within the movement, the TERF 1 types still stay in charge and can exert some control over the movement, also of course hoping to affect TERF 2 types so that they can become consistent TERF 1 types. This might change if some group realizes the TERF 2 types are a separate group and manages to create a whole new ideology and movement on its basis. I think the "conservative feminists", for instance, are trying to do just this.

I don't like this defense of Rowling. By the same token the actual position of George Lincoln Rockwell, David Duke or William Luther Pierce isn't what their enemies say they are. But everyone on some level understands that these guys are ultimately not on the same team as BLM, the ADL and whoever supports those things.

To play with the context a little bit, and introduce some snark: If I'm not a racist and I fund a homeless shelter for white people only, am I still not a racist? I mean, I have a lot of black friends, and I do want them to have civil rights, just not the same civil rights I as a white person have. I'm just against the excesses of the modern black activist movement.

I think there is a very obvious ingroup and outgroup distinction that people can very obviously see past. It doesn't matter what the fine print says. Ultimately Rowling is not on the 'correct' team. And in the name of the ideological/intellectual wave that carried feminism: Just like a black person need not define what 'acceptable' means by the wants of white people with power, trans people should not need to define what 'acceptable' means by the wants of women with power. Just like, in the past, women said that they need not define what is 'acceptable' by the wants of men with power.

Rowling, and women, have power. If they are choosing to not lend it to trans women they are doing harm to them. The prison example is especially obvious with regards to this.

I don't think there is an ideological/intellectual tradition worse equipped to deal with trans arguments than feminism. The only way that has been demonstrated is to out yourself as a caricature of a conservative that is pulling the ladder up behind him before the poor people show up. That then mocks them as he is up there and they are down there by telling them to hoist themselves up by their bootstraps.

If I'm not a racist and I fund a homeless shelter for white people only, am I still not a racist?

Literally every other group is allowed segregated spaces, so of course you're not? This kind of thing is allowed to exist, and allowed to grift huge amounts of money from government and charity funds, and nobody considers any of this even remotely racist. In fact you're racist if you question it! (You might remember the person operating this charity as the same one who walks around in traditional African garb and then gets offended when people ask where she's from.) We've seen segregated dorms be allowed and even praised. Why shouldn't this be fine?

To play with the context a little bit, and introduce some snark: If I'm not a racist and I fund a homeless shelter for white people only, am I still not a racist? I mean, I have a lot of black friends, and I do want them to have civil rights, just not the same civil rights I as a white person have. I'm just against the excesses of the modern black activist movement.

I'd say it would be more accurate if you compared it to Oprah Winfrey getting cancelled for opposition to awarding black-only scholarships to transracial people, and donating some of her fortune for a scholarship for "cisblack" people, and then someone making an analogy to Jim Crow in order to attack her.

I'm just against the excesses of the modern black activist movement.

Why would that require creating a homeless shelter for white people only? Black people likely suffer much more from these excesses (and the following actions, like destruction of police effectiveness) than white people. If we lived in a world where major cause of white people's homelessness would be black people - then in that world, having such shelter might make sense, but we're not living in such world.

If they are choosing to not lend it to trans women they are doing harm to them.

That's like saying if you have money and you don't give it to me, as much as I want and when I want, then you are doing harm to me and I am justified in attacking you.

I didn't say that being against the excesses of the modern black activist movement required you to create a homeless shelter for white people only.

The point being made is that you obviously can't display a certain amount of ingroup favoritism for certain groups without that favoritism being framed as bellicose towards the groups not being favored. Even by Rowlings own standard such a thing would be considered wrong. She would, like most people, consider a white only space to be racist. Yet in her defense of herself she plays that exact same scenario out by making trans people the outgroup and women the ingroup. All the while saying, just like all the racists before her, that she doesn't hate anyone, she just wants to protect her ingroup.

If we lived in a world where major cause of white people's homelessness would be black people - then in that world, having such shelter might make sense, but we're not living in such world.

I don't think you have any idea what a world without black people would look like. Considering the massive costs associated with propping up every black population on the planet with the labor of white people. I don't accept your statement.

That's like saying if you have money and you don't give it to me, as much as I want and when I want, then you are doing harm to me and I am justified in attacking you.

Welcome to the feminism Rowling supports. Western society has been gearing themselves towards this exact goal on behalf of women for decades. Your preference for arguments, logic and reasoning is, I'm sorry to say, not relevant. The point here is that Rowling supports this stuff on her behalf. She sees no issues with the logic of men handing women their 'money' and that any man who doesn't accept that is a misogynist. But now that she has 'money' as a woman, she refuses to acknowledge the paradigm she would have been arguing in favor for a few decades ago and balks at the notion of being called a transphobe.

you obviously can't display a certain amount of ingroup favoritism for certain groups without that favoritism being framed as bellicose towards the groups not being favored

Does it work in all directions? I.e. is "promoting women in $thing" obvious sign for hatred of all males? Is NAACP a racist hate organization? Does any affirmative action program have the racial hatred of white people at its core? Is a scholarship available only to women, or only to persons of Native American descent, an obvious mark for hatred of men or all persons who aren't Native Americans? I mean, that's a consistent position, I just want to make sure whether or not it is your position.

Welcome to the feminism Rowling supports

Did Rowling actually say any man who is not actively working for a feminist movement is doing harm to women?

That's not how it would work for someone like Rowling. Who ingroups women and minorities.

For someone like myself, yes, the NAACP is a racist hate group just as much as David Duke and his former KKK chapter was. Yes, the affirmative action programs have the racial hatred of white people at its core just like Jim Crow laws had hatred of black people at its core. Yes, a scholarship only for women is sexist and hateful towards men just like men only being allowed into school was sexist and hateful towards women. Now, at no time did either side of any of these issues describe themselves as hateful in any way. But that doesn't change the fact that the victors of history describe their defeated foes that way.

To clarify, I would not use the word hate to describe these things, just ingroup bias. But people like Rowling have been using terminology such as 'hate' for a long time. Since they accept the cultural narrative of the victors. I just think it's fair it gets applied to people like Rowling by the same standard.

Did Rowling actually say any man who is not actively working for a feminist movement is doing harm to women?

I doubt I could find a direct quote. But considering the feminism she supports which demands that men do give their power away to women or be branded whatever slur is popular with the feminists I don't see why I would need to. I think it would be a fair statement to say that people like Rowling believe the patriarchy does harm to women. And we can just work our way back from there.

Rowling, and women, have power. If they are choosing to not lend it to trans women they are doing harm to them.

I can't tell whether you're saying this as an articulation of what anti-JK-ists believe, or saying it unironically yourself, but either way, it's inaccurate in the same way that "You have money, by not giving it to me you are impoverishing me" is. Not helping != harming.

Within the context of victimary discourse, which Rowling accepts on her end as a woman, there's nothing inaccurate about it. Feminism says men are obligated to do their part in helping women. You might think that this reasoning is 'inaccurate' and have your own preferred outlook on it but that's just a very obviously not congruent with what is happening in reality. Western society is geared towards this. Laws have been written, action taken and Rowling likes this when it benefits her.

But now that the power is in her hands she is a lot more conservative with who gets to benefit from it. Suddenly women should not be obligated to help trans women.

But now that the power is in her hands she is a lot more conservative with who gets to benefit from it. Suddenly women should not be obligated to help trans women.

Which is a perfectly consistent position if you believe trans women are men. Which, as far as I can tell, she does, and is the belief which gets her the hate.

If that were the position she takes I'd be fine with it. She could just call herself a transphobe and move on. But she tries to wriggle her way out of the derogatory labels through the same kind of nuance David Duke would afford himself if asked if he is a racist who hates black people. Rowling wouldn't accept that gambit on behalf of David. So I don't see why anyone should accept hers.

She could just call herself a transphobe and move on.

People should accept a derogatory and politically damaging contentious label chosen by their opponents....because?

To what end? It's simultaneously possible to be for trans people living as they want where it doesn't conflict with other concerns like safety - and thus not be a bigot by many reasonable people's standards- without accepting the metaphysical tenet that they are women as such, due to the obvious problems it causes.

In fact: this was the sort of tolerance that transpeople got and were happy with until relatively recently when activists thought they'd gained the whip hand.

Except believing trans women are men isn’t transphobic, it’s a definition question. An important definition question, but one nonetheless.

It is transphobic by any mainstream formulation of the trans movement. There is probably a formulation of transgenderism that doesn't require twaw and a dozen people probably can be found who believe in it but when you lose every single main stream proponent of a cause in your attempt to steel man a position and simply stating your formulation aloud would in fact get you canceled publicly by the movement I'm not really sure what you're accomplishing. There is also a formulation of transgenderism run by right wing conservative trans people, but it would be wrong to then conclude that fighting transphobia isn't primarily a cause of progressives.

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I'm pretty sure she is being called a transphobe precisely because of that belief of hers. Am I missing something?

But regardless of that:

'Believing black people are dumber than whites isn't racist. It's a question regarding psychological matter of fact.'

'Believing women shouldn't be allowed to vote isn't misogynistic. It's a question of democratic franchisement'

I don't think Rowling would accept that logic. I think she would call anyone who said that a racist misogynist.

It's not about what I, you or any people outside the Overton window think. It's about what Rowling thinks in every other context. This is her world. She broke the rules. And now she wants her case to be heard on grounds she would reject for anyone else.

Why should she accept her opponent's terminology? The term "transphobe" is derogatory, indicating a bigoted hatred of trans people (never mind the etymology of 'phobe').

Because it's not her opponents terminology any more than it is hers. The only problem she has with it is that she is the target. Outside of that she accepts every single premise around such rhetorical devices. Racist, homophobe, misogynist. That's her home. That's how she judges others.

I think Amadan's defense was good from a factual position, but I agree that feminism is ill-equipped to fight off the superweapons it created to gain power. One would hope that people will learn a lesson, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Yes, I should have been more clear about the things I do like vs don't like. It's a good writeup. @Amadan

I don't like this defense of Rowling. By the same token the actual position of George Lincoln Rockwell, David Duke or William Luther Pierce isn't what their enemies say they are. But everyone on some level understands that these guys are ultimately not on the same team as BLM, the ADL and whoever supports those things.

Well, it's more than that. Those guys might not literally want to bring back Jim Crow, but they clearly do/did not like black people and would prefer we live in a segregated society. I genuinely do not think Rowling has animosity towards trans people or wants their rights curtailed except in the very narrow sense of being able to, for example, coinhabit women's prisons.

I don't think "homeless shelter for white people" works at all as an equivalent.

Ultimately Rowling is not on the 'correct' team.

Well, yes, obviously true.

except in the very narrow sense of being able to, for example, coinhabit women's prisons.

Regardless of whether or not transwomen should coinhabit women's prisons, whether or not they do or do not seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance. Do you really think Rowling would dedicate as much effort and energy into her activism if she thought problems on this magnitude were the main issues of the trans movement?

Regardless of whether or not transwomen should coinhabit women's prisons, whether or not they do or do not seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance.

Then why do trans activists push for it so hard? Just concede it then.

Regardless of whether or not transwomen should coinhabit women's prisons, whether or not they do or do not seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance.

Then why do trans activists push for it so hard? Just concede it then.

I should clarify that what I mean is that it seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance to a person who claims to care about women's issues generally. It's clear why this would be a significant issue for trans activists, but not clear to me why it should be a problem of similar magnitude to women's rights activists in general, as Rowling claims to be.

To put it another way, trans activists care about issues that trans people face. They believe that one of the main issues that trans people face is the fact that elements of society do not recognize them as their chosen gender. They believe that this lack of recognition is expressed in many ways, for example in the prison system, via being compelled to inhabit the prison of their biological sex rather than their chosen gender. They might also believe that i.e. trans women who are made to inhabit men's prisons suffer greatly at an individual level, and care specifically about alleviating the suffering of members of their tribe. Thus it seems clear to me how this issue slots into the greater project of trans activists of having society recognize them as their chosen gender rather than assigned at birth gender.

However, JK Rowling claims to be interested first and foremost in women's rights in general. If she perceived the most important problem facing society to be the potential advancement of trans rights, and thus stated that her main mission was the frustration of the advancement of trans rights, in just the same way that trans activists have as their central mission being pro-advancement of trans rights, it would make sense for her to care about i.e. 'should they be assigned to the prison of their chosen gender or not' just as much as trans activists do but in an equal and opposite sense. But JK Rowling doesn't claim to be an anti-trans-rights-activist, or proclaim that the potential increase in trans acceptance is of significant importance in general. She even claims to be for trans-rights in some sense. What she most specifically claims to be is a feminist, and that her main mission is women's rights in general. Yet, she makes an almost disproportionate amount of her online presence and activism about combating these specific areas like trans people being admitted to womens prisons and etc.

A rational person who cared most about women's rights but did not specifically support some areas of trans-rights would still not spend as much time caring or thinking about these specific trans issues as Rowling does: there are bigger fish to fry facing women even in her home country, but especially around the world.

I should clarify that what I mean is that it seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance to a person who claims to care about women's issues generally. It's clear why this would be a significant issue for trans activists, but not clear to me why it should be a problem of similar magnitude to women's rights activists in general, as Rowling claims to be.

It reminds me to an old shibboleth called "voting against your interests". The story went all these poor rednecks vote Republican, but Republicans push through pro-business policies, while Democrats would have pushed through welfare, therefore the poor rednecks are voting against their interest. Well, I don't think people should get to claim what is and isn't a miniscule in the name of another group, if the group is loudly claiming otherwise.

To put it another way, trans activists care about issues that trans people face. They believe that one of the main issues that trans people face is the fact that elements of society do not recognize them as their chosen gender.

What you did here ended up being a bit of a sleight-of-hand. Trans women in prison are a specific issue for both sides, but by slipping in "not being recognized as their chosen gender" you're trying to claim it's a general issue for trans people. Well, TERFs can do, and do the same by claiming the general issue is oppression by the patriarchy, and putting trans women in women's prisons is just a specific instance of a general problem.

A rational person who cared about women's rights but did not specifically support some areas of trans-rights would not spend as much time caring or thinking about these specific trans issues as Rowling does

I would imagine that a rational person who cares about trans rights would not spend so much time caring about putting rapists who had a sentencing-day realization they're trans into women's prisons either, yet here we are.

That's not clear at all. The caricature of the racist who blindly hates everyone that's not like themselves is just fiction. Most e-celeb racists I know of make a very clear point of displaying themselves as not being that since it's recognized as a dehumanizing trope perpetuated by their enemies. They'd say they like black people just as much as the liberals who keep moving into areas with 'better schools' which coincidentally leaves them living in ever less black neighborhoods. Even the founder of Volksfront, in an interview, said that they don't hate anyone. That it's all about justice and being able to live in peace.

Hell, you might even say that they like white people like Rowling likes women. And that they dislike black people like Rowling dislikes trans people. It's not that they actually dislike anyone. Rowling just recognizes that men are dangerous to women and that trans women are men. I mean, that wouldn't fly past Rowling when David Duke says it about blacks, but here Rowling is going for that gambit anyway. It's just silly.

On a side note, if you offered racists like GLR or WLP a compromise of being allowed the legal and social privileges to treat black people like women treat men, they'd jump on it.

I don't think "homeless shelter for white people" works at all as an equivalent.

I think it obviously works as a demonstration of bias. You can't deny shelter based on group favoritism without having to answer for the obvious nature of the favoritism. Sure, in modern society you don't have to so long as you favor and discriminate the correct groups. But here in the abstract I think we can recognize the similarity. If you favor white over black or straight over gay or whatever, are you not then, by the vocabulary Rowling would use without hesitation, some sort of -ist or -phobe? I think that by Rowlings position in totality she is by definition a transphobe. A bigot. A hater. And I think it's fair to call her those things considering how she treats her outgroups. It's literally the same script just turned against her.

Even the most comical caricatures of evil racism can rationalize some sort of justifying mechanism or system for why they discriminate against the outgroup. I think people very obviously recognize that sort of thing for the poor cover that it is. Rowling is not an old school liberal just like modern day racists are not 19th century progressives. She is a transphobe like David Duke is a racist.

I'm glad you put this together for context. Actively avoiding author controversies is a (maybe) weakness of mine, and I trust your interpretation a lot more than anything I could find with a casual Google.

Also, please tell me the related post isn't about Sanderson. I don't want to think too closely about his handling of Internet liberalism and mental illness.

Also, please tell me the related post isn't about Sanderson. I don't want to think too closely about his handling of Internet liberalism and mental illness.

I apologize in advance.

It seems as if hardcoded Blue Tribe members are learning certain facts about modern cultural society that red tribe members have slowly learned throughout the decade or so. Cancel culture does not work on legitimate financial elites.

Eh, Kanye was a billionaire and it worked on him. I think the difference here is that Rowling could maintain control; Adidas came out and said they owned the designs for Yeezy and, of course, they owned any factories, contracts with foreign entities, distribution networks and so on. So they could brush him aside and he would be unable to recover. JKR could theoretically partner with any media company to sell her stuff (and writing isn't really as capital intensive so she has a lot of options here) so she has more leverage.

That said: it is true that cancel culture is better at targeting cultural elites whose public image is more fragile (or it exists in the first place) and they fear losing cachet (which might explain why so many of them are so conformist*) . But some of those people (take Taylor Swift for a recent person that backed down on something inane) are also filthy rich so it seems strange to not consider them elites.

* Like the people who owe their careers to her but couldn't meet her for the reunion.

Eh, Kanye was a billionaire and it worked on him.

Yeah I mean I think its ridiculous to say that cancel culture can't affect billionaires or that it even hasn't affected Rowling. In the sense that, once a person is already rich, only them spending/giving away their own money can stop them from being rich, cancel culture obviously runs into a limit of potential reach. But in basically every domain except money, cancel culture clearly has power even over the wealthy. Rowling's influence over the groups of people she would like to have influence over is clearly less than it would be if she had not taken an anti-trans stance. Perhaps she has more influence over different some smaller, different groups of people. But I bet she would like to express her beliefs and not be 'cancelled,' too.

JK Rowling has ideological allies, because the stance she has taken is one of the main and most divisive culture war issues of our time. She has fallen back to these ideological allies. People who care about the culture war and aren't on her side have cancelled her among themselves -- everyone else, AKA people who either care about the culture war and take her side, or, the significant majority of people, those who do not care about the culture war, have not cancelled her among themselves. Kanye has no ideological allies, because he is taking a culture war stance from two centuries ago, of which one side has already emerged victorious. How much someone will or won't be cancelled and to what extent that cancellation will effect them really isn't anything more complicated of a function than 'how deep does this culture war issue that I deciding to participate in penetrate the public consciousness, and how much of an ideological share of the public who cares is occupied specifically by the side am I taking?'

Kanye has no ideological allies, because he is taking a culture war stance from two centuries ago, of which one side has already emerged victorious.

Kanye's pronouncements on Jews are derived from the currently-prevalent American-Black mythologies, such as those of the Nation of Islam. Kanye does have ideological allies, but they have very little pull among the current PMC.

Yeah, I mean, obviously he has some ideological allies. What I meant is that, right now the CW split on trans issues is almost 50/50 at best, depending on region. Trans people/issues are not popular in many societies. Whereas Kanye's beliefs are touted by are only a tiny proportion of the discourse, widely regarded as crazy extremists. Yes, I'm sure Kanye isn't cancelled among adherents of the Nation of Islam or other anti-semites. That isn't exactly saying much though.

I think the point i am trying to make is that there is a sharp difference between how someone of Rowling's stature is compared to less affluent celebrities. For example, take Louis CK. His life was permanently altered in a profound way. His agents dropped him, his show got cancelled and he was essentially blacklisted from his career for many years. I understand that the criticisms between them are distinct in a large way but neither of them did anything illegal. Rowling is above any type of that retaliation. Since she holds so much power by her ownership of such a popular property, she still holds ultimate power over thousands of jobs and in some instances, entire careers. If she decided to withdraw her trademark from select industries, she could do far more damage financially to publishers, move studios and amusement parks than they could ever dream to do to her. CK was rejected by many of his closest friends and business partners, but i doubt Rowling has had any real push-back from anyone in her day to day business dealings, because those around her simply cannot afford to do so.

Rowling is above any type of that retaliation.

I understand that the criticisms between them are distinct in a large way but neither of them did anything illegal.

I'm not sure how useful 'neither did anything illegal' is as a way to assert that what they did was or wasn't of similar magnitude. The difference that I am claiming exists between their misdeeds, and thus their levels of cancellation, still holds as a difference between these two examples: Louie CK's misdeeds have no 'supporters' in the culture war. There is no one out there who thinks people should be going around and randomly starting to masturbate in front of women who haven't consented to such a thing. Furthermore the question of whether or not its wrong to sexually assault people is a question with much greater cultural penetration, (especially penetration as a percent of the group of people who would otherwise be buying Louie CK's product). I would venture a guess to say that greater than 95 percent of people who would otherwise be interested in buying a ticket to one of his comedy shows would be turned off by the idea that the guy doing the performance was a sex weirdo who had non-consensually masturbated in front of multiple women.

On the other hand, again as stated, aside from having plenty of ideological allies, JK Rowling's issue just doesn't penetrate that much. People into harry potter are actually for the most part young children, who are too young to care about the discourse, and whose purchasing decisions are made by their parents, who are either too old to care, on JK Rowling's side, care more about satisfying their kid's interest in harry potter than their own interest in not supporting the Rowling estate, etc. Of the twitter-millenial-harry-potter-fan demographic who actually is most likely to care, not all of them do, some of them care but support the anti-trans position in the culture war, some that do care and support pro-trans but can pretend its warner bros that's getting all the profits and not rowling and that level of cognitive dissonance is enough for them, etc.

I think the careful wording of her tactics really does affect the level of retaliation she receives. The fact that she repeatedly maintains she has no hate for trans people etc. is important. That much seems obvious to me. If she started explicitly saying she actively hates trans people, I think its obvious that she would grow to a level of radioactivity at least somewhat more like the other listed examples, Kanye/Louie CK etc. Obviously you're right and that she wields a certain type of power that would insulate her somewhat, but I think overall you're understating the way in which the level of her cancellation is actually at least correlated with actual differences in her tactics, flavor of rhetoric, the specific CW issue she's chosen, etc.

There is no one out there who thinks people should be going around and randomly starting to masturbate in front of women who haven't consented to such a thing.

Oh, man...I'm hesitant to dive on this particular grenade, but I think it's really apropos to the larger discussion that's happening here. This is simply a gross mischaracterization. By all accounts, he consistently sought verbal consent, and took "no" for an answer. There's still many good reasons to call this unethical (the power differential, it's likely they didn't take the request seriously or felt pressured in other ways, etc.), but what took place isn't what you're describing -- it's like the talking point that "Woody Allen married his daughter." (And, likewise, his actions can be viewed as extraordinarily unethical, but -- that specific accusation does not reflect the reality of what he did.)

I would say that this is exactly what happened to Rowling -- she has clearly and repeatedly stated her position, and I imagine that if you talked to the average person-on-the-street (that is, if they had any awareness of this at all), they would attribute positions to her that aren't in the same universe. None of it's new, but I do find it dispiriting.

However much this might be the case, you're making a point more about how mis-percieved their actions are, more-so than about how poorly received (the common perception of) those actions are in absolute terms, compared to each other.

Maybe both of them are misunderstood generally. The truth is, though, that even some of the worst interpretations of Rowlings 'misdeeds' are not considered as heinous as some of the best interpretations of Louis CK's. If we're talking about 'Why is Rowling not as cancelled as Louis CK?' my point is only that the difference in this perception is indeed a factor.

It seems as if hardcoded Blue Tribe members are learning certain facts about modern cultural society that red tribe members have slowly learned throughout the decade or so. Cancel culture does not work on legitimate financial elites. It does not matter to what ends you try to smear Rowling with, she is and will always remain extravagantly wealthy and beyond any real financial or cultural danger.

But elites want more than money. they want cultural capital too. Cancel culture erodes some of that. Why else is Jk Rowling, who is a billionaire, writing columns instead of chilling on a private island or replica castle of her Harry Potter kingdom. Money is not enough.

It works best on people who are in a precarious job situation , without reputations, clout, platforms, or valued skills . Academics and journalists can also bounce back from cancellations if they have a platform, like Brett Weinstein and David Shor. This is why building individual platforms/brands is a prudent idea. Create a twitter account, set up a Substack and Patreon, book some podcasts, network, etc.

Cancel culture does not work on legitimate financial elites.

I wonder if we could make a comparison to Kanye. They really dropped the hammer on him, he's not even a billionaire anymore after Adidas cancelled their relationship with him. I suppose he was in a more precarious financial position than Rowling though. At any rate, there are degrees of cancellation. There's been a lot of angry words on the internet - I saw one HP fanfic on AO3 post an angry disclaimer about how much they disliked Rowling. But the trans lobby can't bring out the big guns like the Jewish lobby can.

Interestingly enough, there's also been an undercurrent of antisemitism in the Hogwarts Legacy debate. Apparently you help fight a goblin rebellion in the game. Harry Potter goblins have long been associated with Jews. They run the bank at Gringotts and mint the currency, are considered by wizards to be greedy and treacherous and have hooked noses. Plus, there was actually a star of david in one of the films, on the bank floor of Gringotts. They used a real bank for filming, so this might have been an unintentional slip-up.

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At any rate, there are degrees of cancellation

and there are degrees to "cancellable comments."

Kanye has received the biggest ban hammer of them all, but he has also made the most egregious racial comments of any celebrity in the recent past. Every time I heard an absurd headline about him, I'd think he had been misquoted. Then I'd go watch the source, and it was every bit as deranged as the headline claimed. Even when around good-faith interviewers like Lex, Kanye pulled out every anti-jew stereotype in rapid-fire fashion. Almost as if to ensure the swiftest cancellation possible. When Alex Jones is the sane one in the room, you know Kanye has gone off on the deep end.

Soon after, Chapelle made some similar points about the over-representation of jews in Hollywood and Jon Stewart pretty much gave the 'go ahead' to Chapelle's statement. Now you might say that it's Jon Stewart in damage control trying to not let this thing Streisand itself. But, Chapelle is still popular as ever and untouched. Criticism of Israel is pretty common place and joking about Jewish stereotypes is pretty much permitted in the industry.

Sure, Kanye was the billionaire that got cancelled. But damn did Kanye do everything possible to get cancelled.

They really dropped the hammer on him, he's not even a billionaire anymore after Adidas cancelled their relationship with him.

Then he never really was a billionaire. Theoretical future money you may or may not get from a business deal doesn't actually count.

Then he never really was a billionaire. Theoretical future money you may or may not get from a business deal doesn't actually count.

Well, then most billionaires aren't actual billionaires. The value of of Kanye's stake in Yeezy plummeted absent without his partnership with Adidas (and the fact that no one else would want to fill Adidas's role in the partnership given the stigma around him) . If equity in a company (Kanye's clothing company) doesn't count as wealth then what does? I'm not sure how you would measure wealth, but I that certainly isn't how wealth is normally measured. By your reasoning, there was probably a brief point where Elon Musk was both the richest person in the world and not a billionaire as you define it, given that he didn't, for a decent period of time, have a billion dollars in money outside his stakes in his personal companies.

It seems counterintuitive that a guy who was then richest person ever should yet, according to your unique definition, not be a billionaire. I mean more power to you, but you are using the word in a very strange way.

Note that I didn't say equity in his company. My issue is with the notion that one can be counted as a billionaire when they don't even have the assets yet. In this case, future earnings from his business deal with Adidas that weren't realized. If he isn't a billionaire after that goes up in smoke, then he never was actually a billionaire.

Also... yeah, people do overestimate wealth that is totally ephemeral. I'm not saying that you have to have your wealth all in cash, but I think that there is kind of a minimum threshold of stability here. If I have billions in a diverse variety of investments such that even if I lose one I won't lose them all, that's pretty good. If I have them invested in a single bucket which is pretty stable, that's not as good but still reasonable. If I have billions in an investment that is fairly risky, then I may not deserve to be called a billionaire. If I have billions in dogecoin, then I'm not remotely qualified to be called a billionaire.

It's amazing to me how even here, people will just repeat the worst bad-faith criticism ginned up by Rowling's haters.

Harry Potter goblins have long been associated with Jews.

This is kind of like JRR Tolkien's critics claiming that orcs are meant to be black people or Asians. Rowling's critics found that you can map some goblin traits onto Jews and decided that she did it on purpose because she's an anti-Semite.

Plus, there was actually a star of david in one of the films, on the bank floor of Gringotts. They used a real bank for filming, so this might have been an unintentional slip-up.

Sigh. No, it's not a Star of David. They filmed it at the Australia House in London. It's a star from the Australian flag.

This is kind of like JRR Tolkien's critics claiming that orcs are meant to be black people or Asians.

I'm not sure how to articulate why I don't like this kind of reasoning, but I think it's something like this:

  1. Trait X is widely regarded as bad.

  2. People want to portray ethnic group A as bad, so they associate group A with trait X.

  3. A fiction author wants to make fictional group B look bad, so they associate group B with trait X.

It doesn't follow that the author is trying to associate group A with group B.

At no point did I say Rowling was anti-Semitic, only that her work can be interpreted to be anti-Semitic.

They filmed it at the Australia House in London.

Correct, I slipped up there.

It's a star from the Australian flag.

It's clearly a hexagram, two equilateral triangles, which is also a star of David. The early Australian flag had a hexagram on it as well but this was changed in a couple of years to a seven pointed star. At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.

At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.

Indeed it does; it is a Commonwealth Star, representing the six original states of Australia. The Commonwealth Star now has 7 points but presumably when the Exhibition Hall at Australia House was designed, it had 6.

At no point did I say Rowling was anti-Semitic, only that her work can be interpreted to be anti-Semitic.

Sure it can, but I contend that that is not a good faith interpretation.

It's clearly a hexagram, two equilateral triangles, which is also a star of David. The early Australian flag had a hexagram on it as well but this was changed in a couple of years to a seven pointed star. At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.

I don't know the exact history of the Australia House, but are you claiming they laid down a Jewish Star of David when they built it for some reason? Because I find that a lot less likely than that it was either there for some other decorative purpose, or was based on the earlier Australian flag.

Yeah, I hate this kind of reaching. It's what leads Pathfinder and WotC to replace "race" with "ancestry" and "species."

The ancient Greeks likes to make up tribes of far off people like the amazons, the centaurs, the cynocephali, the Laestrygonians - and while they probably did reflect anxienties and bigotries by the Greeks against people in the world, I think this kind of imagination is an important part of human storytelling. Sure, the real secret of these non-human races is that they're all humans, but emphasizing one aspect or another of humanity.

But they still let us tell interesting stories about broad ideologies. Doctor Who wouldn't be the same without omnicidal Daleks, or assimilationist Cybermen. Those two alien species aren't "really" non-human aliens. Much of sci-fi and fantasy is not trying to do genuinely speculative "what if there was an alien species that differed from humanity in major way X", but instead presenting an allegorical reflection of humanity to criticize some tendency in humanity. It's like Black Mirror - several of the episodes are just our world, but with aspect X taken to some crazy extreme to make the faults of our current system more striking.

It's silly to pretend that the goblins in Harry Potter are or always were anti-Semitic. The best argument you could say on this front is that folkloric goblins might have some atavistic anit-Semitic traits, which Rowling unthinkingly reproduced. That doesn't mean that any story where the goblins rise up against oppressive wizard kind is automatically anti-Semitic.

I wonder if we could make a comparison to Kanye

At any rate, there are degrees of cancellation.

Based on the degree of the crime committed. JK Rowling is fighting at the front line border of the culture war, and has held rather orthodox progressive views aside from transgenderism. Even in the trasngenderism debate she is using a different branch of progressivism, feminism, to fight it. It would likely be different is she was fighting some already past and adopted progressive tenet. Another difference with Kanye is that he criticized the ethnic group of a large number of elites rather than a group that the elites push.

Kanye knows that rap careers are short. Old rappers are not going on tour, unlike old rockers. He's looking for some sort of second act: pundit, politician, etc. Being unnecessarily controversial even if it costs him money is part of that.

That is absurd. He was making more money than he ever had before, in the months preceding his cancelation he made up the majority of online sales on Adidas' website. The world was his oyster, he had reached the greatest financial success of his life, surpassed all his peers, and the value of his company was still sky rocketing.

Old rappers are not going on tour, unlike old rockers.

Tour? You do realize that he was now a billionaire designer, yes? Who cares about going on tour? Kanye had one of the most devoted fan bases, and he can and did go on tour, but he now a fashion brand, who happened to rap as a side job. Rhianna, another artist turned billionaire fashion label, hasn't performed in 10 years. It doesn't matter. They don't have to do that kind of stuff any more.

Then he lost billions of dollars in a single week, and if you think that it was part of some 3D chess move and not just bad impulse control then I don't know what to tell you.

Old rappers are not going on tour, unlike old rockers.

Snoop Dogg (51 years old), Eminem (50 years old), Big Daddy Kane (54 years old), Ice-T* (64 years old), Rakim (54 years old), Krs-One (57 years old), Chuck D (62 years old) and Slick Rick (58 years old) are all touring in 2023.

*As a member of Body Count.

Old rappers are not going on tour, unlike old rockers

How much of that is the relative newness of rap, though? Along with the preponderance of solo acts meaning that death/disability to a name means that it can't be Ship of Theseus'd like a lot of bands are at this point.

He had a second act: fashion. That he fought really, really hard for. He then immolated it and most of his non-rap business links not due to some career plan, but because he's a mentally ill narcissist.

I actually think he's not narcissistic at all, but is surrounded by narcissistic people and he doesn't know how to cope. Like all good creatives and artists, he's doing his best to represent the world as he sees it because he wants to help people but he does it in a way that steps on toes, and he thinks it's ok to step on toes because he thinks he's revealing things that will help people because it's helped him in the past. But he, like many of us at themotte, finds that exposing his reality gets him in hot water, but he's past the point of caring about not stepping on toes of people he sees as the elite, when he thinks it can help empower people who really deserve to be helped.

More plainly: Kanye sees Jews as oppressing poor people in America. He wants to help poor people in America, so he attacks Jews. He's not crazy, he just has a different perspective than everyone else who thinks "I can't attack jews because [fill in the blank.]" He thinks "I need to attack jews because they have the power, they are literally the ones who can keep me from being a billionaire (see what happened) and I'd rather attack people with power than poor hillbillies who wear White Lives Matter t-shirts" (hence his wearing a white lives matter t-shirt and attacking Jews.)

I'm not defending his actions or beliefs but it drives me crazy to see everyone misunderstanding him and thinking he's mentally ill when he's so clearly just working from a different perspective than the vast majority of people, in my opinion.

More plainly: Kanye sees Jews as oppressing poor people in America. He wants to help poor people in America, so he attacks Jews. He's not crazy, he just has a different perspective than everyone else

My opinion on Kanye being a narcissist long predates anything about Jews. Trust me, there's about a decade and a half of weirdo things he's done.

We could put that aside and still have reams of evidence.

I'm not defending his actions or beliefs but it drives me crazy to see everyone misunderstanding him and thinking he's mentally ill when he's so clearly just working from a different perspective than the vast majority of people, in my opinion.

People think he's mentally ill because he's literally a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder who's talked about going off his meds, and then does things -like torch a lifetime's work in a totally unproductive way- that make it appear as if he's manic.

No one doubts that he has a different perspective. The issue is how many different ones he has depends on how stable he is on that day.

What always strikes me about TERFs is that Trans people are far from the greatest targets of their ire. The 'radical feminist' part of the moniker is quite apt. It's a sect of feminism that has always at the very least been skeptical if not hostile to men as a class, where you see references to feminism as man haters this is the group that gained them that reputation. People broadly didn't and don't care that this group does pretty much all of the things they do to trans people to men in general. I understand the argument that trans people are particularly vulnerable to this kind of group's ire and men in general aren't but it's a bit of an experience to watch people that have been broadly nodding along to the kinds of thing this group has been saying for a long time, if not outright endorsing it, when it was targeted at me suddenly find the exact same rhetoric reprehensible when another group is subject to it.

For this reason I think the right aligned groups swinging behind her are finding themselves quite strange bedfellows indeed. I have a kind of admiration for TERFs in a way, in a world where I'm seeing people abandon principles like free speech the exact milisecond they become inconvenient there is something refreshing about a group that stands so rigidly by the principles, even if I oppose those principles.

For what it's worth, I have a couple of posts on my tumblr that collects nuanced social justice leftist positions making precisely the point you're making, here -- namely, that excessive hatred of men and hostility towards trans people are related, and should be rejected in tandem.

(explanations from me in square brackets)

Example #1:

I know misandry is fun and all but “men are born evil and women are pure and incapable of doing harm 😌🥰” gender essentialism still leads to transmisogyny ultimately even though you include trans men and women in it

It’s the kind of thinking that leads to the idea that afab [assigned female at birth] = safe and amab [assigned male at birth] = dangerous and one of the reasons why amab non binary people and trans women are still shunned within queer spaces because of perceived “maleness” being treated like a poison you can’t fully “cleanse” yourself of like essentialism is still bad when repackaged as inclusive of trans people and something that can be exploited to turn people who aren’t transfem against us lol

(The last time I posted this, someone thought the "I know misandry is fun and all" part was serious, so I'm just going to take a moment to point out the sarcasm for anyone not accustomed to the idiom, btw.)

Example #2:

saying this as a trans dude: I honestly think you really can’t be a good trans ally if you’re gonna treat cis dyadic men [dyadic = not intersex iirc] as inherently evil/worse than everyone else

like yes toxic masculinity and certain socialization and being unaware of privilege can lead to a higher incidence of shitty behavior, it’s not stupid to be wary of cis dyadic men, but that’s different than believing they are inherently worse than anyone else simply by the fact that they are cisgendered men

you can’t say you don’t discriminate based off of gender identity while also saying that people of a certain agab and gender identity are inherently bad full stop.

also it Will bleed over to trans people even if you don’t realize it. if you think being amab and male makes someone shitty you’re gonna apply that to amab trans people and transmascs regardless of agab [assigned gender at birth]. any amab person who doesn’t completely dissociate from masculinity and any person who embraces it is gonna be considered shittier than everyone else bc they’re closer to cis men, unless people just ignore the parts of peoples identity and presentation they don’t like which is still garbage

and also like. even if it didn’t affect trans people it’s still incredibly shitty to think that any gender identity/agab combo is inherently worse than others

They're not wrong! Nor are they unique. I can definitely recall similar arguments from other people that I can't immediately locate right now.

Do you identify as a radical feminist?

I do not, no. Nor do any of the people I'm quoting, if I were to guess.

Apologies for my delayed response, I've been grappling with where to even grab your previous post from in order to respond. The obvious angle to take it is continuing to contrast the feminist view of trans people with the feminist view of men, and I do think there is some interesting stuff there. But I find myself getting less and less value out of the term feminist at all. Except for a distant, unusually conservative, branch of my family tree I'd struggle to name a person who wouldn't self describe as feminist. And even that unusually conservative branch the difference between them and what seems to be considered modern feminism(the shocking belief that women are people, or less glibly that men and women are roughly equal to men in average talent and moral worth) is mostly word games and passionless religious incantations not reflected in the way they actually behave in the world.

So what even is a feminist perspective? It seems to me that the different branches of feminism as I sometimes hear them described are just manifestations of the how the more generic ideologies interact with women. radical/critical/marxist feminism is just marxist class analysis applied to women. Liberal feminism is just liberalism applied to women. Progressive/intersectional feminism is just madness about the place women take in the wider progressive stack of the movement.

Perhaps I'm looking it at backwards, maybe debates about feminist have been such a throughline of my internet argue dude career for so long, back to the very beginning, that I actually view much of the culture war through some warped reverse feminist lens. My views on Marxism/liberalism/progressivism are so married to their implication on the eternal gender war that the word feminism just becomes redundant, easily pulled out of the ideological parenthesis like a 4 in (4x+4).

But your quotes just seem like liberals confused by progressivism with no real relevance to the disagreement at hand. Maybe this was actually a fitting response to what I originally wrote though. I think maybe how these things fit together is that I've been worried about there other groups, including their feminist incarnations, for a while now and it seems like for the most part liberalism has turned a blind eye to them because the movement in general just assumed all feminists were on their side. If a sect of feminism was angry at the men then they were probably in the right and we shouldn't really bother to look that deeply at it. And even these quotes you bring up only seem to half care about the fact that this has been going on forever because of the implication it has on trans people. Like seriously? It took the implication that demonizing people like me would imply demonizing another group for you to think maybe it's a shitty tactic? And we're keeping toxic masculinity still huh?

And I know you, and people like you, are out there. And I appreciate you. But I'm losing hope that anyone is learning anything from things like this. I think whether ultimate the trans things turns out to be a wrong or right turn when everything settles we're still going to go right back to pathologize masculine excellence and demonize masculine weaknesses. Because as much as we, in at least some spaces, acknowledge the existence of the women are wonderful effect and the real differences between girls and boys we are still going to blame male patriarchy in all the areas men excel and pathologize all the areas men fail at and end up trying to fit boy shaped pegs into girl shaped holes the kind of roles that women find most comfortable for them to be in. I've given up hope that there really is some force of truth that is going to shock us out of this comfortable groove.

In the tumblr context, I read these people as closer to "intersectional feminist" than anything else. Specifically, I read them as "intersectional" because they are not just narrowly interested in male/female as the single axis of oppression. They're trying to take other complications into account. As such, this critique of yours is honestly pretty fair:

And even these quotes you bring up only seem to half care about the fact that this has been going on forever because of the implication it has on trans people. Like seriously? It took the implication that demonizing people like me would imply demonizing another group for you to think maybe it's a shitty tactic?

There's a whole category of semi-nuanced intersectional thinking that falls into this category. Intersectionality forces people to see that societal oppression is complicated and takes place across multiple axes that interfere with each other in weird and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Follow that thought sincerely enough and open-mindedly enough for long enough and you'll eventually see places where the thing you're critiquing is a side effect of a central unjustified criticism of a group that you didn't think was oppressed at all. Which is better than not seeing those things, but is still going to come across as half-baked at best to someone who was worried about the central unjustified criticism to begin with, yeah.

I think the support for TERFs from the right is mostly an own the libs thing. Rowling is perfect for this because as OP states Harry Potter is the closest thing to a Bible progressive white women have. The fact that the writer isn’t 100% down with the progressive agenda is great snark for the right.

The great irony of JK Rowling is that a decade ago she was seen as being laughably, annoyingly left-wing on most issues. She's literally in alignment with woke thought on everything but the Trans issue, and her insistence on being vocal about her thoughts (Which was generally met with applause and cheering till she commented on Trans individuals) is what's led to this situation.

Most equivalent pop culture figures just don't vocalize their opinions.

I think the right aligned groups swinging behind her are finding themselves quite strange bedfellows indeed

In isolation, rolling coal is an act of lunacy. But knowing that it makes the libs seethe makes it a past time for certain people on the right.

Rowling is not on the right at all. But she seriously triggers some progressives, so some rightoids like her now.

The right swinging behind TERFs is because they largely understand TERFs to be an unpopular fargroup that will have no choice but to accept whatever hand they're dealt in a hypothetical rightwinger/TERF coalition. And sure, there's an element of wishful thinking, but it's true and correct that TERFs are an unpopular group that's too unlikable to expect to be the dominant partner in some sort of broad coalition.

Yes, and also the right has a history of aligning with radical feminists on some issues, such as on pornography.

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