FtttG
User ID: 1175
Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.
Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.
(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)
I see your point. In my defense, when I use a word like "normie", I am certainly not thinking of board game fans or hardcore Harry Potter enthusiasts. Many moons ago I was part of a friend group with whom I'd meet up and play board and TTRPG games, a group which included (pseudonyms obviously):
- Robert, a trans man
- Robert's boyfriend Jesse, a cis man who seems to exclusively date trans men (after he and Robert broke up, he explored the world of polyamory for awhile, becoming embroiled in multiple concurrent relationships with trans men or non-binary women; eventually he settled down into a monogamous relationship with one of the former, whom he married)
- Oliver, a male person who claimed to be a trans woman (despite going by his birth name, not medically transitioning and making zero effort to pass)
- Celia, a bisexual woman
- Norbert, a bisexual man
Most of whom were, if not Extremely, then certainly Very Online. If such a composition is in any way representative of the broader board game/TTRPG enthusiast community, at a glance we can see they are a highly selected subculture with values and expectations very different from the mainstream - "bisexual trans person who owns a twelve-sided die and knows what Chaotic Neutral means" is not my idea of a "normie". I've no doubt that wokeness is still ascendant therein and that one could face cancellation for neglecting to mouth woke platitudes in the board gaming community (likewise in video game design, YA literature, knitting circles etc.). But there was a period in the 2010s (peaking in summer 2020) where it really looked like the social rules governing those intensely woke subcultures had a good chance of becoming the social rules governing every Anglophone community (explicitly conservative subcultures like churches and gun clubs excepted). And based on the reaction to this ad, I do think that specific cultural moment has decisively passed. Mainstream spaces are no longer obligatorily woke; caveat emptor for subcultures, many of which are just as woke as ever (if not more so, in light of evaporative cooling).
In the Anglophone world, the "racial reckoning" of 2020 was so widespread and omnipresent that even numerous people who had been thitherto wholly ignorant of politics (esp. identity politics) got swept up in it: everyone was expected to post black squares on Instagram. I feel confident that a plurality of Americans would know who George Floyd is and what he's "famous" for; even though I'd say a plurality of Americans would know what Harry Potter is, I don't know if JK Rowling herself would have quite that level of name recognition, and even of those people who do know who she is, I assume she's known as the creator of Harry Potter first and for her political opinions a distant second, if at all. In point of fact, we already sort of knew that the "JK Rowling is a bigoted genocidal TERF, don't offer her any financial support" thing didn't really have teeth, outside of TRA and nerd circles: despite an attempted boycott mentioned prominently in its Wikipedia lede (which also goes out of its way to smear Rowling as an antisemite), Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling video game of 2023 and has grossed over $1 billion in revenue. I very much doubt that this is a "knowingly buying Hogwarts Legacy to own the libs" situation: I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people who bought a copy of the game were wholly unaware that any attempted boycott even existed. If they had been told that there had been an attempted boycotting, I imagine a significant number would have assumed that it had been organised by the religious right, in protest of the Harry Potter franchise promoting witchcraft - they literally aren't aware of the "JK Rowling is a TERF" meme. When I talk about "normies", that's who I'm talking about.
FtttG
5mo ago
I see your point, although my understanding is that the risk of contracting HIV from getting stuck with a contaminated needle is vanishingly low, and the risk of contracting it from a dirty scissor blade presumably lower still.
It's interesting that these people think it's perfectly legitimate to discriminate against prospective sexual partners on the basis of viruses of the mind; actual viruses, on the other hand, are off-limits.
FtttG
5mo ago
I honestly wonder how they'd react if I started saying various racist, sexist etc. things while getting my hair cut. They'd ask me to leave, of course, but I can't imagine they'd have much luck physically removing me from the premises.
A queer barbershop/salon opened near my flat recently. On the front window there's a mural listing all of the things which are forbidden inside:
- No homophobia
- No transphobia
- No sexism
- No racism
- No facism
- No xenophobia
- No pozphobia* (U=U)
The fifth one isn't a typo: it really says no facism. I'm assuming they meant to say "no fascism" but misspelled it (pretty embarrassing to misspell a word which is presumably one of the most commonly used in your vocabulary). But now I'm wondering: maybe they really did mean facism (as in, no discriminating on the basis of facial appearance)? I remarked to herself that I thought that was just called "dating".
FtttG
5mo ago
IIRC John Lydon of the Sex Pistols fame was making noises about this open secret in 1978.
FtttG
5mo ago
If you've seen Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, it was adapted from one of his other novellas.
FtttG
5mo ago
Don't text her bro.
Joking aside, great post. I think you would enjoy Ted Chiang's novella "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", a much better exploration of the multiverse concept than the vastly overrated Everything Everywhere all at Once.
I saw some takes about this on Substack. Richard Hanania compares the people calling the ad eugenics propaganda to the Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in the 1960s who still thought the war was going on. Somebody else whose name escapes me commented that, if this had happened five years ago, everyone would be expected to weigh in on it and would be viewed with suspicion if they didn't, American Eagle would issue a statement apologising for the campaign and reiterating their commitment to racial equality (and making a large donation to the ACLU to prove it) and Sydney Sweeney would have been unable to get any roles for a year.
There does appear to have been a vibe shift. It's not that woke people were holding the whip five years ago, and now they're running scared. Woke people, even woke people in positions of considerable power and influence, are still able to express pretty out-there woke opinions to their heart's content, without any negative repercussions for their careers. The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along. No one is going to get fired from their job for saying "I don't think American Eagle are crypto-Nazis, and I think it's silly to say so"; five years ago I don't know if that would have been the case.
Unfortunately, I think this ship sailed decades ago. In the public imagination, "paedophile" scans as synonymous with "person who has sexually assaulted a person below the age of majority, without penetration" or "person who has committed statutory rape" or "person who has been accused of committing statutory rape" or "person who seems interested in committing statutory rape" or even in some cases "person who is significantly older than his or her romantic or sexual partner (even if said partner is of the age of majority)". (Hell, in at least one case it was seen as synonymous with "paediatrician" - this article is twenty-five years old.)
A person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" will be accused of pedantic hair-splitting at best and nefarious motives at worst (honestly, I don't even think the latter is unreasonable, unless the person drawing the distinction is a literal clinical psychologist or similar); likewise a person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" (a disorder of sexual attraction which does not imply a particular pattern of behaviour) and "child molestation" (an actual behaviour).
FtttG
5mo ago
they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood
Are you predicting that literally no Palestinian children in Gaza will survive to adulthood?
FtttG
5mo ago
I have no idea whether it's a plausible outcome. But it does have precedent in living memory, namely the post-war American occupations of Germany and (especially) Japan. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility.
FtttG
5mo ago
A product designer in a medtech company trying to develop a new way of diagnosing fertility disorders.
FtttG
5mo ago
we can finally stop sending them massive amounts of direct and indirect aid
I'd have no objection to that, personally.
Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options... Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government
According to polls of Palestinians conducted between October 31st and November 7th, 2023, support for Hamas stood at 76%; for the Al-Aqsa Briagades at 80%; for Palestinian Islamic Jihad at 84%; and for the Al-Qassam Brigades at 89%. In 2023, Netanyahu's approval rating among Israelis stood at 47%.
FtttG
5mo ago
Over the weekend, I finished cutting things out of the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project. It now sits at about 113k words, 20k words (15%) shorter than the first draft. Under the assumption that the second draft should be no longer than 90% of the first draft, this gives me a "budget" of about 7k words to play with, to add in details that occurred to me since completing the first draft. I'm aiming to have the second draft finished by August 10th.
FtttG
5mo ago
The "completely unruly" part is doing the heavy lifting here. The only reason Hamas and the broader Palestinian movement keeps waging its pointless self-destructive war against Israel is because of its quixotic belief that Israel could ever be defeated militarily. As Richard Hanania argues, Israel must crush Palestinian hopes. If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests. If Israel can achieve a durable peace in the region without having to resort to genocide or ethnic cleansing, I'm sure they'd vastly prefer that over the alternative.
If the best you can say in favour of this country that it offers its citizens better survival rates than the civil war Iraq or Syria
Actually, I can do better. It has the 20th highest life expectancy in the world, ranking above numerous European nations including many in Western Europe. Its intentional homicide rate is marginally higher than most of Western Europe, but given that these murders are overwhelmingly concentrated among the Arab citizenry, the country seems to be doing a pretty good job at its stated mission of serving as a safe haven for Jews in particular.
FtttG
5mo ago
your own state security forces murdering you knowingly to avoid an awkward situation for the politicians is something again many orders of magnitude worse and more troublesome.
Sure, it's more troublesome. But as I've gone to great lengths to argue and contrary to your and the OP's framing, Israelis are not "very unsafe" because of the existence of the Hannibal directive. Ostensibly, this thread isn't about how "troublesome" the Israeli government is, but how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations.
Is the Hannibal directive a troublesome policy for which the Israeli government ought to face criticism? Of course, I've never suggested otherwise. Should it factor into any honest, disinterested discussion of how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations? No, obviously not. Surely no one would dispute that a random Israeli civilian is orders of magnitude less likely to die violently than a randomly selected civilian of any other Middle Eastern country - and none of those countries, to my knowledge, have any official policy analogous to the Hannibal directive. I'd even go so far to say that, given the rate of civil war, ethnic cleansing and political repression, a randomly selected civilian in any other Middle Eastern country is vastly more likely to die at the hands of that country's security forces than a randomly selected Israeli civilian is.
Out of curiosity, was she also Indian? If so, was she from the same caste as you?
I hope it's not too late, but the Barbican is pretty cool.
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