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Notes -
National feminist organizations break their silence on Amber Heard in an open letter of support
For context: the judgment against Heard - in a trial where I think it's fair to say she suffered greatly in the public eye - was in June. Why come out now?
The line itself is all pretty standard. To stretch my muscles of charity: feminists are concerned that legal barriers and what appears (to them) as "punitive" lawsuits will discourage victims. As is often the case, they choose to emphasize speaking generically about victims rather than actually delve into why so many people and a jury didn't think Heard was a good example of one. Which is not what trials are about.
To me the only interesting thing is...why now? The trial was the talk of the internet for weeks. Why did none of these feminists come out then?
I speculated originally that the news media was deliberately not covering the trial in order to avoid giving Depp - who was clearly benefitting from the PR war - the attention he desired. TBH that delusional idea - that things don't gain attention or legitimacy unless the media "validates" them - is an idea I see around left-leaning spaces a lot.
But this doesn't apply to feminist orgs. And, even if it did, they could have done what the media did and come out right after the trial to do damage control and tut-tut about the "worrying implications" and, of course, the claim that bots and others were manipulating the discussion.
Why on Earth did it take this long? Did they have to spend all that time wrangling these people together and convincing them that the ingroup wouldn't mind? That seems overly optimistic; I imagine their audience made up their mind a while ago.
Edit: arjin said it better and faster
I've noticed that consensus-enforcing groups are getting smarter about not directly engaging when the majority of people disagree with them and are still hot about the issue. After the trial support for Depp was high almost everywhere on social media outside of dedicated leftist bunkers like resetera, and the few feminists who tried to publicly hashtag against him were widely mocked. All the effort had to go into keeping the faithful from straying.
But now everyone's forgotten, and they can start rewriting the narrative without opposition. So it makes sense to delay issuing a statement until people will no longer go "hey, that doesn't sound like a socially prestigious belief I will be praised for uncritically repeating; why am I listening to this group? They might get me made fun of!"
Ideally most people who supported Depp will never remember they were on the wrong side of herstory for a brief moment. From that perspective the audience never really "make up their minds," so much as have their minds made for them on an ongoing basis, and the real winners focus on the long game.
Something very similar happened with the Rittenhouse trial. Now that everyone's forgotten about it there's a fresh push to reestablish the consensus that he was an evil murderer, which was impossible right after the trial when even redditors had forgotten what side they were supposed to be on.
Wait just a moment. Are you arguing that there was some kind of clarity moment where anti-Rittenhouse people were swayed to believing sincerely that he was innocent/the good guy in that scenario? I'd like to see proof of that.
No, the hardcore partisans just shut up temporarily, and let the normies go "woah, this was obviously self defense: I didn't realize he shot white guys!" for a few weeks. Then the normies forget everything and the partisans go back to establishing the local conformity field. Same thing happened with Zimmerman.
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